From the day one, Google focus on quality. In the earlier days of SEO and Google, Backlinks were awesome trick to get ranked on google for any keyword. So People used to do alot of Spam with software for backlinks. Some of them Spun a single article thousand times to get backlinks.
Then in 2000s, Panda update was rolled out. This plugin just kicked out the low quality content websites from the Search Engine Results, and High Quality content websites got top positions.
After that in 2014, Penguin update was released and All low quality back links websites were penalized, with this update the Spam backlinks scenario was shutdown.
Now, The only thing that can rank your website is, High Quality content and Backlinks from Authority websites.
