Is On Page SEO Dead With Google?

There is an interesting thread taking place at WebmasterWorld.

In short, a very respected and senior member at the forums said he made on-page text changes to his pages about 10 days ago and those changes had zero impact on his Google rankings. He was wondering the value of on-page text and SEO have in 2012. He said, "I have always have this suspicion, that text on site is just for google to what its about, but almost zero value for rankings."

Maybe it will take more time, but Google already indexed his new content.

WebmasterWorld administrator said he is dead on - that on page text is less of a ranking factor these days and more of a relevancy factor. Read what Tedster wrote:

The way I see it, on-page text today is for the "relevance" part of the total algorithm. The whole algorithm is, in broad strokes, "relevance + connectedness + quality". After you've clearly stated the relevance of the page, then the rest of your ranking power comes from elsewhere.

I've added on-page bold tags with no effect. I've added or changed h1 elements with no effect. Not too long ago, those might well have done something, but that's not the game anymore.

And moving from a table layout to a CSS-P layout today might get you nowhere, too. It all depends how deeply complicated the table layout was, I think.

Is on-page SEO dead? Or is it a timing thing?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.