Google penalties vs. awards

We talk a lot about penalties in the SERPS - but are there "rewards" too?

[MatthewHSE]

I just read the current thread about duplicate content, and it got me thinking how many penalties people speculate are used by Google. Many penalties are served out for things that people do without intending to spam Google (I got hit once myself several years ago through ignorant use of hidden text) and they need to be discussed.

But I think an equally important question is, are there little things a webmaster can do to get "brownie points" from Google?

Of course, there are the obvious things to make pages easily crawled and to keep content relevant. But that's not what I'm talking about. What I mean is things like using FrontPage meta tags, using a few invalid or proprietary tags, etc.

Either of those, for instance, could indicate that a non-professional webmaster has created the site. If that's true, then it would be a fair assumption that the page was written mostly to inform rather than to profit, and sites like that could (in theory) be generalized as being more informative and/or accurate than a site that's trying to sell something.

Could this be accurate? Is it a long shot? Or am I just plain off in left field?