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Many of our clients often hear us refer to
the "Google Dance" and what it can
do to search engine rankings. It can be a
frustrating time for search engine optimization
experts as well as their clients. So, what
exactly is the Google Dance and what does
it mean for your Web site?
As we know, Google's spiders
are constantly crawling the Web looking for
new information on millions of Web pages.
Roughly once a month, Google updates their
index by recalculating the page rankings of
each of the Web pages they have crawled. Search
engine optimization experts commonly refer
to this update period as the Google Dance.
To ensure complete accuracy, these calculations
must be performed multiple times. Additionally,
because Google's index is enormous, the calculations
will take several days -- or even months,
as we recently witnessed -- to complete. During
this time, PageRank and ranking will fluctuate,
and sometimes wildly. With the blink of an
eye, you can go from a ranking of three to
a ranking of six. Consequently, the name Google
Dance emerged, denoting these fluctuations.
This crazy dance usually occurs towards the
end of the month. Granted, you may see mild
fluctuations in your search engine ranking
at other times of the month, but they are
merely a result of Google's daily crawl, known
as "fresh crawl". The fresh crawl
occurs almost continuously to locate frequently
updated sites already in the Google index
and then add the new content to the Google
database. If you are interested in seeing
the dance in action, it is fairly easy. Google
has two other searchable servers (www2.google.com
and www3.google.com) in addition to their
main server (www.google.com). Typically, the
results on all three servers are the same.
However, during the Google Dance, your search
engine ranking results will be different.
Once the Dance is over, your new ranking will
be visible on all three servers.During the
Dance, if you go to either of the two servers
mentioned above, you can see the new rankings
that will eventually appear on Google's main
server once the Dance is over. We urge our
clients not to focus too sharply on watching
the Google Dance take place. It can be extremely
frustrating, especially if your site accidentally
gets dropped from the index altogether. Yes,
this has been known to happen. In fact, it
has happened to us on occasion. You may temporarily
lose traffic, if not your mind.So, tread lightly
where the Google Dance is concerned. Our advice:
Leave the worrying to the search engine optimization
experts, sit back, and enjoy your new-found
ranking. |
