Very good post Dave ! but as I think GA and WMT only provides data that can help us in our current activity plans and traffic as well as website traffic, but if Google will going to release new updates then these tools can’t help us. As you have described in “what is real seo”, I have seen many seo advisers blogs. But the simple thing is be honest with content on your website but due to competition we need to create back links but should avoid from spamming.