Chek out this post
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=9739
It is updates from what Google had to say.
Here is some of it
Here's the interesting part. The Google tech representative said the company's brand sites were dropped because they were cross-linked to corporate sites, he thinks due to duplicate content -- to me, that's not satisfying.
In essence, Google didn't make the decisions based on the fact that they were clients. These cross-links between the brand and corp sites were bringing down the page rank of the brand sites. I'll be looking into this and trying to get more info as the session continues.
Meanwhile, the issue that's important here is that there is relationship between the sales and tech departments at Google.