Google penalties can be lifted

A few weeks ago I posted about David Airey's Google penalty.He has just updated that post noting that the penalty was lifted and his Google rank has shot up and his hits have subsequently reflected this.Read his post and then continue reading this one.After reading his post a few things came to mind. Firstly Google Pagerank and search results are absolutely imperative to a successful blog. No shit. Secondly, to a certain extent Google can and does restrict bloggers, whether this is conscious or subconscious it is still happening.David is the perfect example and now I am questioning my tactics and what I do on my blogs.My concern is for SA Rocks. I ran a badge competition a while back and when the winner was announced I hoped that people would use the badge on their sites to show support for SA and how much it rocks. Simple.But is it possible that I could receive a penalty? Oh, wait, can I even blog about this or will it alert google's spam team to what I have done?There are ethics involved ofcourse. They must surely and hopefully do take in to account the intention of the blogger when he/she "broke" the rules.The last problem or concern I have with all of this is exactly what counts as "Black hat SEO" and exactly what is a "bad neighbourhood" to link to?There are some links that David provides to try and help with these issues; here and here