Google has various servers (or data centers), these data centers sometimes don't match up while they are out spidering websites. This can cause a discrepancy between rankings or indexing. These are generally resolved once each data center has crawled your website and has data from all servers.

Google Dance was a big issue in the past - when they used to update every 36-ish days or so. They have now begun spidering weekly - which means the discrepancies won't be as noticeable as they once were.

If your ranking remains low, the chances are that all data centers have finished indexing the site and determined that the appropriate ranking is what you are now receiving. If this is the case, you will want to concentrate on optimizing your site to get a higher ranking again.

"Google Dance was a big issue in the past - when they used to update every 36-ish days or so. They have now begun spidering weekly - which means the discrepancies won't be as noticeable as they once were."

Thank you for that - I did not know they spidered weekly. So to wait a week is pretty much normal - it must just mean they haven't got round to your sites yet.

But people often talk about getting indexed in 24 hours? What do they do to make the spiders notice them more? I know about:

*Keywords - keywords matching in title, url, h1 and anchor text, description

*LSI - the more relevant the words are (as google sees it) to the subject, the more likely it is your site is going to be seen as relevant and ranked accordingly

*Backlinks - good quality backlinks are great for your website, like votes of confidence for your website. Best to have a mixture including PR4+ and some lower, also some no follow ones as well in order that they look natural to Google

*RSS Backlinks - I put the RSS feeds through a submitter and to some good quality RSS sites

*Plugins - I use all-in-one SEO and xml sitemap generator

*Helpful content - information that will help the reader, useful stuff, decent quality for a positive experience from the website.

*Contact Us, Privacy Policy, Sitemap (although I do not put a sitemap on a one page site)

So what are the guys that get indexed really fast doing that is different from me?

*wonders about attracting Google pheromones*

Ruth

Excellent posts everyone, you're right on point.

I myself find the dance somewhat annoying as key articles can disappear from SERPS for a couple days, which is quite noticeable when browsing stats. Boo!

I think I am too experiencing google dance with my website. My indexed pages were acting very odd this week. Some of my pages were getting de-indexed and indexed back to normal while some of the pages have completely vanished and hasnt returned to normal state like my homepage which just happened few hours ago. btw my website is only 4 months old and was indexed on oct, 2009.
Im keeping my calm. Lets see how this goes and cold anyone verify this is a google dance. Thanks

A seasoned marketer doesn't see the dance as a problem at all because they're in it for the long-haul (years). What does it matter how your site's ranking on any given day or week? Complete waste of energy worrying about it. Just create good content and get it linked.