i don't proclaim to be any seo expert, but fucking all this talk of google's anti-seo stance drives me nuts. i swear to god it's all so blown out of proportion. 98% fear mongering. duplicate content, predictable linking patterns, nowhere near as threatening as they're made out to be in my opinion. just my
though...
really, what is google going to do, penalize or de-index anyone who ranks well? are they going to manually investigate every single page ranking first page for every single search term that throws up a flag? i honestly don't think they care half as much as everyone talks like they do.
why would they be out to destroy webmasters? webmasters are their bread and butter. they can change their algorithms, shuffle the serps every once in a while and thats more than enough to keep things moving around.
build a quality page with informative quality content, and vary your backlinking strategies so you have links coming from a variety of spaces. as long as it's not cloaked shit spam pages or mfas clogging up the top rankings, i doubt they give a fuck.