potentialgeek - 6:40 pm on Oct 31, 2011 (gmt 0)

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.