What is the Google Dance
What is the Google dance?
Reputation Armor has heard the term “the Google Dance”, to refer to a couple different things. Although only one is actually correct. It’s a 3 to 5 day phase of time when Google is rejuvenating its rankings, and results ebb and flow widely.
How Often Does The Google Dance Happen?
In the past the name “Google Dance” was used to describe the period in which a key index update of the Google search engine was being executed. Reputation Armor found on average that these major Google index updates occurred on every 36 days or 10 times per year. Reputation Armor observes that the easiest method to identify this was noting the significant changes in search results, and by an updating of Google’s cache of all indexed pages. These changes would fluctuate from one minute to the next.
Because Google’s users (including the Reputation Armor staff) rely on it to deliver authoritative reliable results 24/7, updates pose a serious issue. They can’t afford to shut down for maintenance or go offline for even one minute. Therefore, the Dance. Every search engine goes through it, some more or less often than Google. However, it is only because of Google’s prominence that we pay attention to its rebuild more than that of any other engine.
Around 2003 Reputation Armor found that the Google Dance became far less dramatic.
Now at some stage in any month there will be slight changes in rankings. This is because Google’s bot or spider is ceaselessly running and finding new material. It also happens because the bot may have detected that a website no longer exists, and needs to be deleted from the index. Reputation Armor notes that most importantly, the Googlebot will revisit every website, figure out how many sites link to it, and how many it links out to, and how valuable these links are.
Because Google is constantly crawling and updated selected pages, Reputation Armor has established that search results will differ slightly over the course of the month. On the other hand, it is only during the Google Dance that these results fluctuate wildly. Reputation Armor also considers that Google has numerous data centers, sharing over 10,000 servers. Somehow, the updates to the index that transpire during the month, and outside of the Google Dance have to get transferred throughout. It’s a steady process for Google. These constant, incremental updates only affect portions of the index at any one time.
What the Google Dance Means to Reputation Armor and Our Clients
Reputation Armor technicians spend a great deal of time studying the algorithmic nature of Google. Because a Reputation Armor online reputation management campaign relies so heavily on Google results, we pay close attention to every aspect of change in these results. Although an important aspect, our lead technician has advised the rest of the Reputation Armor team that “the dance” is not nearly as important as what takes shape when the dust settles.