claaarky - 9:59 am on Jun 24, 2012 (gmt 0)

Lostone, it does explain brands as well (in fact any site not hit by Panda).

As long as your ratio of bad pages overall is low you won't be hit by Panda. Therefore, some terrible pages can rank. Users of brand sites already know and trust the brand, so they may navigate to a bad page and it won't seriously affect their interaction with that site.

Hence really big brands can avoid panda because even their bad pages don't cause a user reaction so bad that it reduces the quality signals.

If I'm right on this it's a result of over 12 months of studying everything written about Panda, experimenting, spending money unnecessarily, having to let staff go, finding a good SEO, knowing other people with sites that were and werent affected by Panda. In short, if I've cracked it, it's been through bloody hard work. If I haven't the quest goes on.