I suspect sites can get protection from Panda if they are considered great by Vince

Well, if a site is so good that it is "considered great by Vince", then it's probably good enough to avoid problems with Panda too, and therefore wouldn't need any special "protection" anyway. So it's hard to give definite yes or no answer to your question

then it's probably good enough to avoid problems with Panda too

Judging by the list of quality sites that have been hit hard by Panda I don't think that's the case.

Vince, Panda, the other countless tinkerings... does it really matter?

Google has a vision of what the internet should be and any site not conforming receives no exposure, end of story, except Google isn't sharing specific details about what that ideal is so I offer that all webmaster energy wasted on trying to please Google would be put to better use creating better websites. Let Google catch up for a change, as a webmaster YOU are in charge.

Judging by the list of quality sites that have been hit hard by Panda I don't think that's the case.

I don't remember seeing a list of quality sites that have been hit hard by Panda. What are some examples of these sites? Are there any big brands on it?

I don't think it was vince, if it were vince we wouldn't have seen the false positive panda hits we saw, as some of those sites benefitted from the vince update - Amazon for example took an 8% hit in the initial panda. Maybe vince was pre-panda, but its definitely its own beast

I think of vince as a whitelist, and panda as a plague.

Question, where did all these panda, and vince name came from?

Panda came from the name of the fellow responsible for the update. I think it's misnamed - it was originally called the farmers updated (for 'content farms') which I believe is more appropriate. Calling it panda detracts from the point behind the change.

Vince and Panda work together. Vince promotes authority/trusted sites; Panda demotes thin/shallow sites.

Vince 2.0 I believe gave more authority to sites that Vince 1.0 liked. The dial got turned up. After 2.0, Vince in my sector let the top two authority sites for widgets get many top rankings for related keyword search phrases; e.g., red widgets; blue widgets; white widgets, etc., etc. Before Vince they had no rankings for those phrases. After Vince 1.0 they got top 5; after Vince 2.0, top 1-2.

By the way, these two sites are not "brands." They are simply "authority" sites with the most in-bound links. They were ranked #1 and #2 for widgets for the last few years. Cutts has already said Google doesn't look to promote brands. They look for authority and trust. (Because brands have some special authority and trust, they get high SERPs.)

Webmasters need to think about Vince at the same time as Panda to see the big picture, and possibly rebound from Pandalization. Many of us got so focused on Panda we forgot about Vince.

The rich got richer and the poor got poorer with Vince and Panda. My concern is that even if I recover from Panda, I will still not get my original rankings back because of Vince.

The Vince part of the algorithm may re-calculate its values almost continually, rather than going through the periodic full iterations that the Panda part of the algorithm apparently does. This would make it harder to see the effects of Vince, except when Google makes a major change to the Vince algorithm itself.

I went back and looked at the data.

June 14-21 is the time when one sector I'm in got a Vince update. That's when Google decided one of my sites is an authority and very trustworthy. Since that week, it started to give me very high rankings for widgets, just below wiki and another major site.

At the same time it also centralized authority for multiple examples of the most popular related phrases with widgets. The site had not been updated in any way; there was no related marketing campaign (links, etc.). No effort whatsoever on SEO.

It's the same kind of situation I saw with the different sector I mentioned where two websites got authority status, and then got top rankings for related keyword phrases.

The interesting thing in the case of the June Vince Update is the site went from being Pandalized to becoming an authority fairly quickly. From mid-April to mid-June it was in the tank (presumably Pandalized on April 11).

What I previously thought was a recovery from Panda I'm now convinced was a Vince update because of the new authority and ranking for related phrases.

It reminds me of how things were a few years ago, when, once you became an authority on widgets, you could write about anything related to widgets and rank really well (first page) for those phrases.

Also, you may recall in the days of the -950 penalty, how sites could recover from changes (mine) or simply by getting a new link from an authority site (others).

Ironically, I still don't know why my site which is now considered an authority by Google gets the new elite status. If I did, maybe I could get several of my Pandalized sites out of the pit!

Well it's still not clear to me how you can be so sure that your site's recovery was due to Vince rather than some other reason.

It could be a Kansas City shuffle. get everyone looking at Panda and instead of tweaking that algo tweak Vince. It would be sneaky and not too improbable.

PGeek, your theory is good reading, and perhaps absolutly correct. I hope this gets more attention, debate and thought.

But today, for this site owner, its like finding out that it wasn't strychnine in my ice tea; it was arsenic. My status is pretty much the same, whatever the poison.

There's an interesting update going on now (and in recent days) which makes it look like a slight Panda recovery. What it is, I believe, is a Vince Update/tweak which gives higher ranking to the domain name (when it's a perfect match).

I'm seeing this across multiple searches in different sectors on unchanged websites. The update is small; it's moving sites up by positions of +1 or +2. I'm seeing it for my own sites and other sites.

Vince > Panda > Other algo changes