I have been out of the business of promoting my site to increase google rankings since 2011. Has anything major changed besides gathering quality backlinks since then?
For some many things changed as Google has them jumping through hoops, but for others nothing much changes as things just keep improving and getting better in the main. For me the most significant change in SEO over the past 2 years (well since May 25th 2010 actually) has been the change to responsive design. But for others all sorts of things have changed. Only 1 of my clients was affected by Google updates but it has not been difficult to deal with IMHO. You should probably look at brushing up on things to do with Google panda and penguin which it sounds like you may have not been that aware of...
In addition, Google has since frowned upon article directories like ezine and link building techniques such as link pyramids.