Originally Posted by Relentless

haha... as you already know...

If people don't enjoy your site when they reach it, Google will send less of them in the future. That means actually granting visitors a user experience worth returning to in the future, so they will like your site and spend their time on your site, etc etc etc... Humans don't like duplicative uninspired disinteresting text. They aren't interested in blurry mass produced images that look just like everything else on every other site and all of the basic white hat SEO factors are still important... page titles, tags, links, content, etc... but humans are able to judge content quality better than any bot, so Google is using their judgements as a major factor in its own rankings.

The fundamental point is that making real sites takes time, effort and expense and many webmasters spend all their time trying to avoid investing their effort and expense in their sites. In most cases the time spent trying to circumvent working on your sites with a trick or gimmick would have been better spent actually improving your sites. Google will never penalize you for building something people actually want to see and enjoy legally online. Building quality sites costs more time, effort and expense but it also offers you the peace of mind that you aren't going to be sunk by some nerf in an update to their algo...