The Google Dance Explained And Revisited.

[franchiseshop]

After some recent comments on a different thread I would like to give an explanation of what the Google dance is and what may cause it. Let's call it putting some reasonable explanation across for some very specific terms.

The Google Dance is where your SERP's (search engine ranking positions) jump up and down the index/rankings, perhaps from 3 to 14 and back again and fluctuating regularly over a period of days. In effect, "dancing".

There is one primary cause of the Google dance and this is Google rebuilding it's index after an update. As Google cannot/will-not come offline for a few days to perform maintenance, it's updates are rolled out live and across many datacentres. When you query Google you are being given a set of results from any given datacentre and if 2 datacentres are in different throws of the update, they will of course give you differing results, thus causing the rankings to dance up and down the SERP's.

Over the past few years the Google dance has not been so much of a problem, where as before Google used to roll out large updates several times per year, now they roll them out weekly and the updates are not so noticeable. However, this does not mean it no longer happens, there are still times when large scale updates are rolled out and during these times we are likely to see the SERP's start to dance again.

Some other reasons for the Google Dance.

As mentioned, the primary reasons for your SERP's to fluctuate in the index is due to Google rebuilding their index after an update, however there are other minor reasons that your rankings may "dance".

1. New websites can take a while to float to their semi static positions in the SERP's. Google will need to crawl the website several times and start building up a knowledge base of that website to know which positions to rank it for. During one crawl it may rank the website for a particular position and the next crawl another. Although this is not strictly speaking the Google dance, it may come across as it, however this is just Google indexing and ranking a site and getting to know it. Log into your webmaster tools if you are signed up and look at all the information Google has on you in there, that is just a snippet of their knowledge base on your website and they need to build it all up before they can make an accurate analysis.

2. Link building campaigns can affect the rankings, if a website gains a large amount of fresh links in a short period of time this information may take a while to filter through to all the data centres. When you query Google multiple times you may be receiving results from different data centres each time, data centres with a different set of information on your website. Again this may give you the impression that your rankings are dancing but in essence it is just Google still in the process of collating all the information they know on your website.

Technically speaking with both of these it may appear your website is dancing up and down the rankings but the Google dance is the term for rankings fluctuating during an update and not for any other reasons that your website may "dance". However, as time goes on, any movement in the SERP's seems to be referred to as the Google Dance so it could well be that the phrase is developing over time and can now be used to describe any unnatural looking movement.

So to summarize, The Google dance is where your rankings fluctuate over a period of several days due to Google rolling out an update and re-building it's index.

Alternatively, the rankings may appear to dance whilst Google builds and collates it's knowledge base on your website

There will be some other reasons why rankings may fluctuate, and I am not referring to the supplemental index, sandboxes or penalties, so if anyone has some good reasons why please post them

[Saidar]

Originally Posted by franchiseshop

Alternatively, the rankings may appear to dance whilst Google builds and collates it's knowledge base on your website

Nice post and theories, but I agree the most to the statement above, that makes more sense to me. It takes a few crawls to establish some sort of "history" for the site. Without previous data the site's ranking can't be accurately calculated and thus this "dance" may occur for new sites.

[Steven Carl Kelly]

If you're concerned about Google's multiple datacenters and distribution of database updates, you could always perform your search through various Google datacenters to check your rankings.

[franchiseshop]

Originally Posted by Steven Carl Kelly

If you're concerned about Google's multiple datacenters and distribution of database updates, you could always perform your search through various Google datacenters to check your rankings.

It's not so much of a concern on a daily basis but yes, a good idea if you are seeing the Google Dance and want to confirm that an update or anomaly is happening.

[chakrur4i]

awesome post!! now I know why my site fluctuates around during my keyword searches.. thank you so much mate!!

[anwar001]

Thanks for the information and clearing out so much confusion for a lot of people who had experienced the dance.

[jlaw6402]

Bookmark'd, thank you for this. I really appreciate it.

[young-seo]

when new indexing data is pushed out to data center it updates the data it is tended to happen about once a month.these resulting changes is called as Google Dance

[rtrotter]

franchiseshop,

Nice explanation but some was left out. First, at each data center there is more than one index. There is one they call their fast index which is used to track rapidly changing sites sure as Digg, Twitter etc. Then there is the standard index, local index and media index. Updating of those also cause variations in rank.

Then you have to consider how a search is processed. We know they show for a particular term there may be a few million results. They do not look at those every time. They pull what is seen as the top 2000 from that population based mainly on page rank and newest of site. Then on those 2000 they do duplicate content checks and more refined keyword analysis, and in the end show the top 1000.

A new page can often get on page one of results where its CTR is measured. Google knows what the CTR for each position is and if they try a new page at a particular position and it does not get target CTR then it drops. An easily automated process. It is their way of giving new pages a chance while links are being built to it. We have all had that nice surprise of our new post getting on page one within just a few hours. That is not pure chance. (Good reason to built links to new pages quickly.) As those new pages move all the others do also. It's a nice slow dance.

Rodney

[Jimerson Farveez]

Thanks for the post, Great info, Me too have a nice site, still not indexing, I hve to get more backlinks, Great

[youtring]

Thanks for the information man, Well Done... U Should always come up with new ideas.