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The linkscape is complex. Most of the time, the answer is "high quality content and many authoritative links". Other, complex times, it's not. When is it Not? I'm competing with two sites that quite simply suck for a relatively competitive keyword phrase. Neither provide useful content. Neither have much content at all (one has 10 pages). Neither have very many links. Both stuff targeted keywords into their pages, and receive high LDA scores. One benefits from a long history of being listed in DMOZ for this targeted keyword (rather than their company name), the other benefits from being part of a sizable parent company and receiving regular links resulting from various real-world resellers of their product. Neither have performed any article marketing, content marketing, or link building over the last year. How do those two sites compete with mine at all? It's not their content. It's not their authoritative links. (I'm assuming it's a mix of their high LDA, their extremely natural link profiles [with almost no linkrot over 10 years], and their ranking history. Anyway, my point is there are exclusions to the rule about content and links.)

90% client work, 10% personal side projects mostly for running my own SEO experiments which may end up helping me with my clients.

Interesting I have been doing bits and pieces of SEO for Baidu recently, was looking for more information.

I think what he says is often less important than what he doesn't say. As the defacto Google spokesman to our industry, he's in a tough position, and I think if you're fair, you'll admit he does a good job for Google, and provides good info to us. You just have to read between the lines a little. I've yet to ever see Matt caught in a lie. More often, people are to quick to hear what they want to hear.