Back in the days when I was running pretty large SEO company (at its peak it was around 500 small businesses using us) few of guys in this field chimmed in and

Back in the days when I was running pretty large SEO company (at its peak it was around 500 small businesses using us) few of guys in this field chimmed in and got some heavy testing done. This was done around penguin or panda update (not sure though). We have got 200 domains with no SEO done to them before, got some Wordpress blogs and started testing trying to see how accurate Matt Cutts suggestions were. Unfortunately results were not only mostly random, but also pretty opposite to what we have learned from Matt. Websites that were spammed (but in smart way) were ranking pretty good, while WH sites barely made to top 20 for targeted keywords. You can see tons of examples like that around the marketing forums. I am wondering if Google overgrown itself algorithm wise and if they still know whats going on there.