Originally Posted by signupdamnit

Domain age + Quality Backlinks + Branded presence (or appearance thereof) seems to almost make you immune. That's why they stay. It looks like the algorithmic penalties hit smaller sites harder and leaves the brands alone more. Lots of talk about this since Panda was first rolled out.

I think some of it is just ridiculous. They may as well remove all the crap and go back to ranking by pure relevance along with adding a "+1" and "-1" feature specific to the search phrase.