Man, i agree with faglork... chill!
There is no one magic bullet for achieving a top 10 position in the serp's. True, there are things that should be avoided at all costs, most of which are pretty obvious and common sense... but the fact is that both collusion and elite skills claim to be successful at what they do, so is it not possible that they have both found a magic combination of
seo and linking that works for them?
Obviousl IBL's 'can be' important, but the days of manging hundreds and thousands of direct recpriprocal links on links/resources pages and expecting them to contibute much of anything to your se position are numbered. Almost everyone does it and the se's just aren't that stupid.
On the other hand, good honest non reciprocal contextual links, using good anchor text, placed right within good quality content can be like gold when they're coming from a quality, topic related site, or authority site.
Seo is important, but if you know how to use common sense when laying out your content, then most of
seo is just that... commmon sense and happens pretty much by default when writting page titles, meta tags, headers and copy...
There are a lot of different elements that are used by the modern day se, which makes for may different combinations... if you do a good job on one, you can probably be a little sloppy on the others... but wouldn't it be better to just do a bang up job right across the board. The se's would end up with better results to serve up and the user would have more quality results to choose from.
It's all about to change anyway... lol!
Ps... collusion... i had a quick look at the FrankieJS.com and donn't see how you can say that it is well optimized for 'Chicago Fine Dining'. Granted it isn't a terribly competitive term, well defined, but still.... shaky page title, no description tag, abundance of useless meta tags, no external style sheet resulting in mega formating tags, table instead of full css, poor use of hx and i could only find the search term intact once....
I'm not being critical so much as i am confused. I don't be pretend to know everything about
seo, for that would be a fools domain... i do plan on being at it for a good long time though so thought you might comment.