[distantparts]

In my experience, the animal updates and other recent changes definitely favour the big brands. My main car reviews site (established 1997) was hammered by Panda, and has never recovered, while the big brands I competed with have been left untouched, despite having content that is often lower quality.

While I think Google has done a really poor job of helping smaller sites who've been unfairly hit by these changes, I don't think there is anything underhand going on. I just think Google decided to tune their algorithms to minimise the number of bad results they show.

They appear to be happy with results that favour big brands that they trust, while excluding most of the worst content farms, even though the cost of that is potentially failing to deliver high quality results from smaller sites. I'm sure they have user satisfaction statistics that justify this trade-off they're making. No malevolence or greed is required from Google in this scenario.

In the short term, this is probably good for Google's users, but in the long term, it's creating a two tier web, where new entrants will find it more difficult than they should to compete with established brands.

p.s. There seems to be a similar tradeoff made in terms of newer pages being favoured over older, more relevant pages. It makes sense in some cases (news for example), but in my view, the newness signal is too strong at the moment, and it's hurting the quality of their search results.