Web Talk

Until some years ago Google Dance was very well-known to every webmaster knowing a little bit about Google and the way it works. Google Dance was that lapse of time, usually from 6 to 8 days, where a major index and ranking update of the Google search engine was performed. During these days Google also recalculated backlinks of every page in the Internet to determine how important and authoritative a certain website was. Once this big check was finished Google had to update all its datacenters scattered all over the world. This was made little by little because a lot of data was involved and, as a result, some datacenters were updated right away while other ones not. Google Dance occurred on average every 36 days or 10 times per year. It was very easy to spot because your website, your most competitive keywords and such could disappear or be placed low in the SERP from one minute to the very next one, while other not-very-famous websites and their pages were placed high in the search for no apparent reasons. To check if a Google Dance is on and if your website is affected by it, just perform this simple check. As I said there are a lot of datacenters which have to be updated. A datacenter is just a particular server having a web address giving you, as a result, the well-known Google search page. On this page just writesite:www.yourwebsite.com. Do this for every datacenter available. After that compare all the results (I mean the number of your website’s pages which are indexed by that datacenter you performed the query on). If you see that some datacenter has not indexed all of your website’s pages while other ones do, it is highly probable that your website is undergoing a Google Dance. Here are the datacenters’ addresses:

• www.google.com
• www2.google.com
• www3.google.com
• 216.239.37.99
• 216.239.39.99
• 216.239.41.99
• 216.239.51.99
• 216.239.37.104
• 216.239.41.104
• 216.239.37.147
• 64.233.161.98
• 64.233.161.99
• 64.233.161.104
• 64.233.161.105

Since August 2003 Google Dance doesn’t exist anymore…officially. Its name has been changed into a more professional and less dramatic Google Everflux and it is performed every week, with most movement occurring on Mondays. The results, anyway, even though less traumatic than the ones seen in the Google Dance, have the same effects but for a shorter lapse of time (some hours or a day at most). Anyway there are still a lot of people thinking that the famous Google Dance still exists. I am myself prone to think like that because once in a while my blog undergoes a dramatic drop in its visits. This effect just lasts 4 or 5 days and, all of a sudden everything comes back to normal. I don’t think that it has to do with Google Sandbox at all, since with the sandbox the drop should last longer than a few days. I don’t even think it has to do with demographic waves that periodically hit all websites because they are linked to specific periods such as: summertime, good weather, holidays and such. The only thing which explains what happens to my blog is just the Google Dance