Understanding The Google Dance
Whats the Google dance? Well, its really just a fun phrase for when Google updates its index. This occurs regularly, once a month, and can cause a lot of movement in rankings, meaning that its come to be feared by many in the SEO industry and anticipated by others. The update isnt just one sudden switch, though, as each index update takes several days to complete. During this update the searches seem to dance between the old index and new index thats the Google dance.
One common misunderstanding is the idea that Google controls which server each kind of information is coming from, and so stores similar information on the same server. Googles index doesnt work this way its a big, disorganized mass of information that Google searches very quickly. This is a blessing in disguise because it allows your site to remain reachable via other sites that are related to it when the index is taking place. Your site generally wont suffer for too long when an update is taking place anyway, but if you are heavily dependent on Google results, you will see a slight drop for a short period of time. This drop is often followed by a slight spike especially if your page rank has increased since the last index.
You see, the time-to-live for www.google.com is only five minutes that means that Googles IP address can change every five minutes. This allows them to switch between their datacenters regularly, spreading the search load between them intelligently and routing around any damage. If you constantly entered the same datacenter with every search that you placed it would almost certainly fry within twenty four hours. Considering the number of users on Google each and every day, it is surprising that ten thousand servers is enough. A server can only handle so much traffic in a day and Google insures that it can hold more than any other service on the internet.
The datacenters updating their indexes at different times causes Google to do its dance. Unless youre looking for your websites ranking, youd never notice this as your site is normally available at all times. The unfortunate bit is that often times you will lose your page ranking for a short period of time or your site will seem to have a lower number of pages indexed by Google. If you insure that you have several hundred pages available on Google at all times you will most likely be able to provide all of your content at all times either directly or indirectly.