Are successful sites a business threat to Google SERP's?

And how would they deal with that?

[Whitey]

With the metrics that Google has, would G consider a site with dominant SERP results and high traffic to be eligible for a hand check or algo' demotion in the SERP's?

I wonder what the trigger points might be.

[tedster]

Certainly a hand check is always possible when a domain attracts attention. But if Google's end user is happy with the result, I'm not sure how that site would be seen as a threat - it should be the kind of site Google wants to feature.

If there is some evidence that the end users don't like the result, that's when I might expect to see some kind of action taken. Also, several patents suggest a demotion if the site in question begins to look stagnant: backlinks stop growing, content is not updated for a long time, etc.