Ride45 - 2:23 pm on Aug 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

I think it's a matter of when and how you do your SEO, not necessarily what you do.
I say this because large sites can get away with spammy stuff, while little guys seem to get nailed.

Little sites will often over-optimize too soon -> that's a red flag (too many links too soon and most are reciprocal or paid for, too many pages, poor adsense-to-content ratio,etc..)

Little sites will often game search engines constantly tweaking H1's titles, keyword density, etc.. while, larger sites appear more stable because likely they have gone through alpha -> beta -> live deployments and therefore require little adjustments once indexed, presenting to both users and search engines a stable and very well thought out information architecture.