Being Nice to Googlebots

About 1.5 weeks ago, someone asked how to make his GL site more google friendly. Here are their own published guidelines on how to do that. I also visited a few webmaster forums. In those, others said Google will penalize your site if you use the illicit practices pointed out in their guidelines. Although getting links to your site are important, they also recommended staying far away from any programs or sites which specialize in reciprocal links. Many of the participants in these end up getting penalized.