Is 'Content' still is a king?... Sorry, no longer! Yes, this is true... 'Content' is not considered an autocrat any longer to influence your website ranking. Gone are those days, when some white-hat SEO practitioners would work really hard to create "unique content" for their website -- although most of them ended up creating a content, which was little different from their competitors, not really unique content. "Uniqueness" of content in the context of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is its "Value proposition" to the User/Visitor/Consumer. Merely, creating unique content in terms of language, style, fonts, terminologies, and overall write-up, can never stand at par with the content providing "Unique Value" to the life of the user, consumer or visitor.
At the nascent stage, towards the development of 'Google Search Engine', Google was more focused on indexing the strewn web-pages to fulfill its dream of creating 'largest repository of information' (now, a reality though). As Google continued to crawl, cache, and index web-pages; presumably the use of Title, <meta tags>, alt tags etc., was discreetly entertained by Google to maximize the indexing of the data on the web. By this time, Google succeeded in storing a fairly large chunk of data into its repository. So, some self-proclaimed SEOs (definitely Black-hats, Grey Hats) took it as an opportunity to mint money quickly and enormously, by stuffing the website title(s), snippets, HTML coding with lots of keywords. Since, those days the Google was still at the developmental stage, so the spam-handling mechanism was not robust enough to take on these malicious attempts ─ aimed at artificially inflating the relevance (Page Rank) of the web-page/web-