I wouldn't de-optimize anything, unless you are doing something obviouly shady...wait one second - do sometthing really shady - they have all of the top spot now anyway - lol.
There's some good points here:
http://search-engine-goldmine.com/analysis.html
PPC shit sucks. Surfer that don't even know the difference between PPC or the "real" results. Google consistantly delivered good results. That's why they blew up.
This just really left room for some competetion. IMO