jecasc - 7:33 am on Oct 6, 2011 (gmt 0)

he also mentioned that his traffic was going up and so was his sales. so presumably his site was useful to people. more and more people were visiting it, and using it to get what they wanted.

No, the visitors had to visit the website in order to get somewhere else. His website was not helpful it was an obstacle, a hurdle people had to overcome to get to where they really wanted to go. Now Google is probably taking his visitors directly to their goal.