PcMech rarely returned in Google search

[Parangles]

Its very rare that I Google some computer problem and
get a return from a PcMech forum thread.
Why is this? You would get more traffic here if you attended to that.
Sure, I often come here and do a search, but I'm saying
that for some reason other sites seem to be more visible.
Are other sites paying Google to be returned in searches ?

[glc]

We may have lost the high rankings last month when we had server issues - we temporarily disabled friendly search in the forum settings and added a block in the robots.txt file on the server to reduce the server load. I'd think it's only a matter of time before it catches back up. I know it's not a matter of payment.

[Parangles]

Google is not as perfect as they would like us to believe.
Returns are often ones from 3 years ago or more, while more
recent and more pertinent ones(later found without Googles
help) are ignored. Who knows what esoteric criteria
causes one to be favoured over another ?

[Force Flow]

The more people visit a link through google, the higher the rank of the link.