Breaking SEO rules - multi keyword stuffing on homepage

Hi all,
My client has an established site (nearly 2 years old). I found that our competitor went against all seo principles by writing a very long homepage, full of many keyword phrases repeated over and over, that is about ten two and three word phrases, and damned if they werent ranking high in the serps for most of these words, from their homepage !!! The most repeated phrase was done about 12 times out of 1000 words.

No seriously, that threw me through a loop, since I had been dedicatedly building reciprocal links for months, and from checking their site, they had bugger all links pointing in! Long story short, I changed the whole homepage in one hit, modelled it after theires, including writing a short paragraph on each particular state of interests, so it could even include 'local' search ideas - without a specific landing page.

Downside, Google didnt like the sudden change and pushed us from page one for a few weeks, but when we came back, we were in a similar position for the main keyword, and also lifted in the secondary words.

It just amazed me that I could go against all the seo advice I had read and make this page a catch all for so many different keywords. Kind of lazy, but I guess if you are throwing most of your links at one page on your site, its a good method, since it actually worked in the real world.

Anyone else have a similar experience with going against 'established' seo principles?

b

Well yes, the whole 'you have to check where you link out to' is complete crap. you can link out to wherever you want and this will not have a negative effect on you. Of course like everything. it will have a negative effect if you link out to 348904782108 pages and you have no authority.

Also in my personal experience reciprocal links are a waste of time until you get a site being somewhat authoritative, then they are golden.

The whole 'topicality matters' for links is complete crap too. I have sites ranking high for mid level keywords with not a single link coming from a site in the same niche and it's ranking fine.

The quantity of links is not a determining factor either, I've seen sites ranking top 3 for incredibly competitive keywords where the competitors have 200k+ links and they only have 1,200. quality, high algorithmic PR and seed pages are what matters the most (well besides domain, domain age etc.)