Google Dance
Bet you didn’t know Google liked a bit of a dance did you? Well it does.
What is the Google Dance?
Google is constantly making updates to it’s dataset, this includes your websites information and ultimately it’s organic ranking results. Approximately every 21 days Google will update their ‘index’ with the latest website rankings. This is when you will usually see a mass update in results. Sometimes the visible changes to Google rankings may seem very minor but that may just be down to good SEO’s and webmasters doing their jobs properly to keep the results for their clients.
This period is often referred to as the Google Dance.
The Google Dance Explained
The volume of data that Google has to process is enormous which can take days even as long as 2 weeks as we’ve previously seen. So during this time of data consumption by Google you may notice results fluctuating, and for that’s the reason the term Google Dance came to be….
We’ve read that this period of indexing usually happens once a month or every 4 weeks but we’ve actually pinned it down to 17-21 days on average. We have even noticed a different Google Bot in the past 18 months visiting our honeypots that we use to track and collate all this information. The bot unlike any other bot will show a different operating system, screen resolution and variable IP addresses not seen before from Google Bot traffic.
I will try and get a screen shot up in the next few days from our statcounter account to show you.
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Director of SEO21 Tom Peary provides an ethical SEO service for any business in the UK. Local SEO specialists, Google Places Optimization, Website Optimization.
3 Comments
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Apr 27 / Mark Benson /
Really useful post thanks for you insight on to what is the Google dance. It make a lot of sense, rather than SEO’s just saying ‘oh! it’s another SERP charge or algo change’.
What does it mean if these changes take longer than the 17-21 days? Am I been penalised by Google for something I shouldn’t have done? -
May 03 / Tom Peary /
Hi Mark thanks for your comments. This is usually do with with your crawl rate settings. Do you have a Google Webmaster account? If so go in to there and change ‘crawl rate’ to a faster setting. If you update your blog/site daily then I would set to daily or faster. Also check your XML sitemap as these may have slower crawl rate priority values set up as well. They score them on a numbered basis from 0.0 to 1.0 – 0 being the slowest least priority and 1.0 being the highest priority page. Your blog should certainly be set up to 1.0 if you use it daily.
Hope this helps!
Tom
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Apr 18 / Cancellation Holidays /
[...] next week or two we will expect to see the usual Google Dance but then settle between position 1 and 2. Which is fantastic news and the traffic results are [...]