There are still a lot of things that work, I just doubt you will see a lot of SEO's blabbing about them in here. The Good SEO's that keep their secrets to themselves know first hand, high rankings with little effort can be achieved if you have the money to buy what you need.
You have to remember, Google makes changes that are defensive. They look at what we do and try to find a way to destroy our work. We look at what Google does and create a plan of attack. Google may win a few battles here and there but they are not going to win the war.
Penguin proved one thing, Google is willing to sacrifice the quality of their results to take us out. Bing is happy to filter our linking efforts out of results to keep the quality of their results high. Who will win using that strategy? Bing.
Some of the best relationships you can have are with your competitors. Bing tolerates a certain amount of stuff we produce, we give Bing some good content to display.. you don't hear people bitching about Bing search.
Google wants to control everything, social networks, search.. do you think all of us are going to give up? I don't know about you but I like food on the table. For me, the Internet is a way to feed my family. I am not going to give up. I am going to retreat, have a look at why I got my ass kicked, look for my enemies weaknesses and exploit them in another attack.
The more Google does to filter results, the more content they will loose. Every person who has ever built a quality website for the sake of making money has done SEO. If you kill those sites that have done any SEO, what the hell will you be left with? The garbage we created to promote our quality sites that we never did much SEO on.
If Google is happy to serve that crap in results, let them. It will be the end of their business.
Until Google finds a balance between what they will let us do to rank a site so we can eat and what they are happy with making out of adwords and adsense, this battle will rage on. There will come a day when we get so good at what we are doing that a room full of geeks with a lot of money will not have a hope in hell of beating us.
What does not kill you makes you stronger. That is fact.
