Quoting "SEOIdiot" might illustrate just how cynical the posting actually is.
Google had done a great job of exposing some of the dashboard statistics already in Webmaster Central:
One of the charts I look at over time is the # of pages crawled/kilobytes/etc. I've seen a decrease in the number of pages crawled per day when the site has been slower, or a decrease in the number of pages when the time spent downloading increased.
I think Rand Fishkin over at SEOMoz (Ignition Partners recently put $1.25M into them as a Series A investment) has attacked the problem with more scientific approaches (though the nature of black-boxes like Google's PageRank does support the notion of "Tribal Knowledge" - and he (Rand) makes money on this "Tribal Knowledge" through a $49/month subscription service)
A couple interesting links that really talk about more scentific approaches:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-pagerank-works-why-the-original-pr-formula-may-be-flawed
http://wiep.net/link-value-factors/
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php3
Do you have other resources you use for SEO?
