If you're involved in large scale SEO testing, you'll know that a huge amount has changed over the last 12 months; and if your techniques haven't changed then your rankings and long term rank security will be decreasing.
Neither techniques, software or theory have remained static in the slightest. Just because there aren't daily announcements of major change, doesn't mean that refinement isn't constantly happening. We've reached a point in the life os SEO where the fundamentals don't change much, but the finer points and the implementation of strategy makes a bigger and bigger difference all the time. As with all specialist fields, the deeper you get into the technicality, the smaller and finer the distinction between success and failure.
Panda has shown this year that a lot of online marketers have been using short term strategies, which while they have achieved short term gains, have damaged mid-long term rankings.
One of the main distinctions I would point out this year is the growing necessity of prevention from over optimisation on new sites and assets. Google's algorithm has gotten much smarter at revealing footprints, and this has meant that those with over optimised content, titles, anchors and domain names have been hit even harder. Niche marketing now requires more thought and a more careful SEO strategy; at least certainly for sites that aren't established yet.
Google is always focused on ways of controlling spam and trying to recognise better quality content and sites. They've got a lot of things wrong, but in the midst of all the problems we face with IM now, I'm comforted by the fact that they're making it harder. As this means that the marketplace is forced to get more professional. I therefore know that if I keep myself in the top 1% of the informed via testing, measuring and empirical evidence, I'll have an even better chance of being passed by as google are kept busy dealing with the 90%+ of crap that's being churned out!
