So I was looking for a site of a well known SEO in Google and he does not show up for his site name.
I remembered a few others that this happened to recently and spoke to a friend who has seen a bunch of this. It appears that this is a rather common occurance now, where sites that are aggressively improving their rankings stop showing up for their keyword and sometimes their site name.
I looked at some of the keywords for this site and some of the deep pages are ranking poorly for his primary terms in Google, but they are outranking the home page (which heavily targets those same terms and is absolutely burried). None of his pages rank for his site name.
I suppose this is a good way for Google to attack people selling competing advertising systems that manipulate their index. Rank them lowly for their keywords AND remove them from the index for their site name.
If people do not show up for their own name it hurts their brand. On the web AND off the web their entire brand is diminished by not showing up for their own name.
Then the only way these people can show up for their own name and brand is by buying in on AdWords, and if you have a strong brand that can become a competitive landscape and those costs can add up quick.
Pretty damn cool self regulating system if you are Google, but kinda sucky for joe average SEO company. :(