More than 3 years ago, high ranking on Google search is very simple, just paste spam link to link back to our money site. If you can put your link on high PR page or able to link back to almost every pages, you are rich.
But not for today, you are able to get high ranking just very short time if your site is low quality, spam content. Google change its algorithm quite often and do minor adjust almost by weekly. Low quality content will be sandbox, this mean still index but no ranking, your site will show on SERP at the last page that no one will reach on that and the worst case is banned by Google, this means no any page show on Google SERP by checking with site:yoursite.com, if there is nothing show then your site is banned.