Wondering about the Google Dance?

Hmm.. I think everyone has been through that. If it was
that easy to keep solid #1 positions I would not site here

Anyway, what I see quite often is that the videosites causes
this drops. It does not have to be direct links but they who take
over the top pos do have videos on their sites.

However this normally is a 2-3 days dance. As if you do
quality SE work. You will get a better score and should
see your pages back up soon.

Daniel

Hi Jason

Everyone seems to experience this -- it *is* scary and enough to drive you nuts, but the good news is that it eventually settles down and you'll be at where google thinks your site deserves to be, in the ranking. What happens is:

* Google sees a new site, places it on page 1
* Newness wears off (like the smell in a new car )
* Your site sinks as deep as it'll go or even totally disappears, but if you do site:yoursite.com you're still in the index
* Your pages reappear on e.g. page 7 or 5 or wherever
* Over the next few weeks they bounce around but generally move up in the ranking
* After 3-6 weeks this "dancing" stops and you end up where google thinks you belong

The trick is to keep google thinking you deserve to be higher up in the ranking. Keep doing what you're doing, adding backlinks, and also keep updating the sites or squidoos or whatever. Once you're on page 1, if you can stay there w/o constantly updating and adding links, you're done. Otherwise keep doing that till you have enough "juice" to be exempt from the dance.

What is happening in the background -- inside google's computers -- is that your page's STRENGTH is being evaluated against other pages competing for position. Once you have more strength than your competition, for a specific search term, you'll rank higher than them. Strength is some complicated composition of the number of backlinks you have, what anchor text they have, how many different hosts on the web these links are coming from, etc etc, and also how relevant the content on your site is. Some people think that the pages from which the inbound links come also figure in the equation, but IMHO the jury is still out on that, and I personally think there's no strong evidence of that now. But of course google may change their algorithm in the future, at which time this factor might become (more?) important.

Anyways, its complicated, noone *really* knows all the parameters, and its really more of a test-and-experiment kind of thing.

Last thing: if anyone tells you they have the secret to ranking high, hold on to your wallet. Remember: noone besides a few people inside google knows, and they're not telling everything that goes into it.