SolveYourProblem
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Series
Google Ranking Updates:
Understanding "The Dance"
What’s
the Google dance? Well, it’s really just a fun
phrase for when Google updates its index. This occurs
regularly, once every several months, and can cause a
lot of movement in rankings, meaning that it’s come to
be feared by many in the SEO industry and anticipated
by others. The update isn’t 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 – that’s the Google dance.
So
why does it happen? Well, Google pulls its results
from over ten thousand servers, and they can’t all be
updated at once – Google would have to go down for the
update. Instead, each server is updated with the new
index, one at a time. This can cause very strange behavior
in the page rank process if two major sites located on
separate servers happen to have a close linking bond.
These sorts of separations are interesting and can contribute
to a great deal of change and motion in page ranks. The
most important thing to keep in mind is that eventually
Google will get you into your proper place. Generally,
if you behave, you will not be thrown down for long by
the odd activity that can occur when Google is in the
process of updating its index for your server (or for
the servers of your favorite link partners.
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.
Google’s index doesn’t work this way – it’s 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
won’t 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.
The
10,000 servers that Google uses are distributed between
seven datacenters all over the world. Google
doesn’t keep all of those eggs in one basket – they want
to be able to lose one datacenter and have the rest survive.
If part of Google goes down, people can still use the
search engine and as I said before, this allows your
site to be accessed via related sites if the server holding
your sites index happens to go down. The datacenters
that Google has put into play are enormous in comparison
to most datacenters around the world. Google rivals some
of the largest datacenters in the world with each of
its datacenters and is probably the largest in the world
if all were combined into one.
You
see, the ‘time-to-live’ for www.google.com is only five
minutes – that means that Google’s 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 you’re looking for your
website’s ranking, you’d 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.
