coachm - 5:34 am on Nov 30, 2012 (gmt 0)

Don't want to go off on a tangent but I also have a feeling they look at the whole portfolio, so I too have been divesting myself of a number of lower quality sites.

It's actual quite relevant, and a topic that deserves more attention, and it's at the heart of the issue. With a single domain, your good content will suffer in the SERPS if you have other low quality content on that site (or so it seems from info from goog). If they are now looking at domain "collections" in the same way, then a single poor quality domain could damage your best ones.

It's complete lunacy logic for google to become LESS fine grained this way, but it does account for why good content is harder to find. And obviously if google looks at all domains, then having a few experimental ones that might be of lower quality (I've done a few of those in the past) would be a bad thing.