I found a free version of the hrefs backlink tool and put your site in there to take a peek. It does not show ALL the links in the free version, however the links it did show tell a very different story than the one you were painting in your original comment / rebuttal to my statements.

Scanning through the list of links, it appears to be a lot of comment spam and profile spam linking to your site. This may not be your doing, I get that. My guess would be that you made the comments and someone else did the profile spam.

My second quick scroll through of the links, I think there is one good link - in an article from gamesfromscratch site - I thought there were two good site links, but it appears the second one (on gameddev dot net) was placed by you.

The other links that stood out, are links that you added on your own sites to your other site.

I mentioned a sitewide header link on your web site with hundreds of posts... I assumed you had hundreds just by looking at your monthly archives listed in the sidebar - if you just have dozens - I apologize, I did not count.

However, the point is the same. You did not just create a good article and good put you in the top results.

Your site made it in the top results using SEO techniques that are supposed to be strictly forbidden, and detected by the magic algorthm, and penalize your site for doing.
(no dofollow links on your own sites, PBN use, profiles, comments or other links added to the net specifically to rank up your pages)

Unless you have filed some disavow lists, but you mentioned that you don't really do anything specific for SEO so I am assuming you have not disavowed links.

So, for sure your initial statement was misleading, even if just an oversight, I am writing this so others you may see this thread are clear.

I also have pages online that also "offer what they are looking for" as do many other sites, however google is downranking many of them and in lots of cases just removing them from the results completely.

What we may also be seeing here, is that google is selectively censoring the internet search results - by saying "don't do these things or you will be downranked or delisted" - and yet it appears they are not downranking your site (which should be super easy for them to determine you are violating the webmaster guidelines, I am able to see this with a free tool in a few minutes, without cloud data centers crunching info) -

However other sites are often down ranked and instead of giving webmasters info in the webmaster dashboard / console - they just point to the general advice and blame the algorithm - when it appears that the general advice is not sufficient for all, only some sites on the net.

Again, google's lack of transparency is my main beef here. Personally I think what you have done is fine - but they laid out all these rules in steps over the years and it is what it is.

As I mentioned in most of my disavow reports, I think google should give webmasters and option to check a box in the webmaster tools that says only count links that I manully approve in the dashboard for or against the site.

This way negative SEO attacks fail, and if someone was purposely trying to spam a bunch of profile links to rank up, the only way it would help is if they vowed, er vouched for the link spam in the dashboard - which would be proof that they are aware of the links and think google should count them to help rank up.

this is an easy option to make things better.

I'd also like to see an option to only count links that have dofollow added to them (as it's hard for some web page makers to make WP menu links nofollow for example)

And people should be notified that google has gotten complaints / spam reports from other internet users / webmasters - like they do with dmca and such.

There is so much more that could be better - this old system they are using is just blanket censorship for multiple reasons by multiple groups of people. It's not fair to users or webmasters, imho, selection bias, your mileage may vary, etc.