I feel compelled to put my less than
As i see it google have not changed their emphasis or their criteria for what is a good site.A mixture of Quality and and not so good quality backlinks is still important,good clean navigation and structure of a site is still important ,outbound links to on topic sites is important.
What has changed is that google has stopped making it easy to game them anymore . Sure you can still spam google short term but people buying expired domains without proper use of them are getting shitloads of pr but no positions in the serps.
Also people buying a bunch of domains at the same time will not last a major update from google.If you buy a group of domains at the same time dont use them in the same nest.Be careful of link farms and dont link to spam domains which is a hard thing not to do in our industry.
Don't hoard your PR.Link out to good quality sites.And google likes outbound links on your page.dont target just 1 keyword but use its many variations.
Also get good pr links and low pr links.Its a bit suss when all your links are pr4 ,5 and 6. And dont go buy domains that have your target keywords in the domain.this is a flag for google to suspect gaming them.
And lastly ignore all this shit i just wrote.
