You may have heard the term “Google dance” tossed around on the Internet, and wondered what it means. Well, you know how when you’re looking for something - like your car keys - and you pat your pockets and turn around and stoop over to look under the newspaper and run to the closet to check the coats and walk around your living room turning your head every which way? You’re “doing the Google”.

What, you’re still here? Oh, alright. The Google dance is simply the period of time that happens between one cycle and another. The cycles are ones where Google’s bots are crawling the web, or when they have indexed the pages and build the results into a search database. From one cycle to the next, search results and placement will vary. The guess is that Google takes about a month to go through this cycle.

A page’s relevance and PageRank can fluctuate wildly during part of the cycle, just because after the database is built it takes about four days for all of the servers to synchronize with the new index. You might pop up #300 for a query in the morning and #10 for the same query in the afternoon.

Here’s one site that demonstrates the discrepancy across many faces of Google: the Google Dance machine. On this page, you will have to suss out the commands in German, but generally you enter a search phrase, check which servers you want it to pull results from, and under ‘options’ you’ll want to set “ab 1″ to “ab 51″ or higher; this is the search results page to show, and “ab 51″ gives you results 51 through 60, which in most cases is where the variables begin to show. Here’s the results from searching for “nethack wizard magic marker” using the servers at ‘.com’, ‘.de’, ‘.ch’, and ‘.at’:

Showing wide variance depending on which server you use. Here’s another site, SEOChat’s Google Dancer, with a simpler interface. Here I searched for “star trek mineral monster”.

Note the left two, for www and www2, and exctly the same, where the other two for www3 and ‘.fi’ are wildly different from them and each other around hit result #190.

What can we tell from all this? Simply that obsessing over your PageRank and search position isn’t always the best way to tell how well your page optimizing is going. Aim for more general targets of results, instead of small tweaks.

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