When I read these schemes I think of get-rich-quick schemes and quickly discount them. Especially, when the author used the word "loophole."
The point is, Google Answers was not to be used as an
SEO tool. So, anything that has the supposed ability to artificially raise your site in the SERPs is likely dishonest. When you read how he suggested manipulating Google itself for this purpose, it should have thrown up all sorts of red-flags in your mind.
Build a clean site for your visitors. As long as it doesn't have any obstructions to the search engines such as a noindex,nofollow statement or built entirely with images and no text, it should be ranked in the SERPs.
The simple truth is you don't need
SEO, just a webmaster to design it properly in the first place.