http://www.jimwestergren.com/v7ndotcom-elursrebmem/

Jim Westergren is back in the lead in the V7ndotcom test contest and he's admirably shared what many whould consider a white hat SEO strategy below. I'm not sure if Google would agree or not about this being white hat, and I'm anxious to ask Matt Cutts about all this the next time I see him. I've been concerned for some time that Google's ferocious defense of the algo may lead them to consider many normal forms of linkage like paid links and link trades "link manipulation" and downrank the sites.

Here's his strategy from his blog (yes, I think he's being totally honest about this but you can never know for sure.

Take my domain that ranks best with Google (domain age, TrustRank, PageRank) and before the start of contest increase the link popularity gradually by placing permanent links using my link building team. Done

Prepare the blog post with a valuable resource of the contest as a link bait and make it all ready so I just have to replace the KWs.Done

Right after KW announcement, blog the post and submit to digg.com. Done

Put an internal link in the footer so that PR from all posts flows to this page. Done

Get enough diggs to get on the front page and ignite the big increase of natural backlinks.
Failure, non-SEO diggers reported the submission even though I got 56 diggs.

Follow up the increase of backlinks by simulating a natural gradual increase using:
(This data was deleted, sorry)