1script - 7:01 pm on Oct 4, 2007 (gmt 0)

@Quadrille:

I completely agree with you on the point of not using vanity searches as a measure of overall site success in Google.

However, this particular type of search "mydomain.com" (in quotes) has been useful in finding whether or not the site has been hit with a penalty of some sort, specifically the notorious -30.

So, this is what exactly I am searching for: "mydomain.com" and it does look like even if the site has no penalty (meaning it comes up as #1) it still competes for the first place with review sites of all the other hundreds of places that have this domain name somewhere on the page, including some pretty strong directories. If a review site does not push mine from #1, it's right there on #2. Some sites that are hit with -30 penalty pretty badly don't even come up until 4th page of SERPs and then #1,2 and 3 are all taken by review sites, not directories, not regular sites or blogs.

It must be in the optimal PR distribution that those guys have figured out or it must be in the way that Google mistakenly treats a URI like
sitemap.php?site=9999 which has a PR0 same as sitemap.php which may have PR5 or even PR6