Why do big brands rank so well, regardless of content and links?

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: Okay, Felip or Felipe Santos in New York asks, “As far as big brands go, why is it that they seem to do well irregardless of relevance, content or links when analyzing keyword placement in search engine results pages?” So, believe it or not, we have a lot of big brands that say, “We don’t show up as often as we should show up.” So it’s safe to assume that mom and pops yell at us for saying big brands rank higher than they should and the big brands yell at us saying, “Well, we’re really, really important in the real world we should show up more in the search results than the mom and pops.” So everybody yells at us on both sides and we just try to say, okay, what is the best page for the user, and we try to return that page. So I would not agree with your question that, you know, big brands always do well irregardless or whether they have any content or not. The big brands, they feel like they don’t do as well as they should. So we try to return the best quality page and that’s just the easiest decision to make, is, you know, what is the best page, how do we find that page, how do we return it to users. And that’s the sort of test that we use in our scoring.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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