The Google Dance

Google Dance is a phrase used when Google updates its index. On an average it is a monthly feature that significantly causes a lot of movement in rankings. Prior to that, significant changes all together in search result used to create panic among the webmasters. However, starting from mid-2003 Google made it a regular feature. But, because of the continuous update, the effects on search results seem to have become quite insignificant. As each index update takes several days to become fully effective, meanwhile the search results seem to ‘dance’ between the old index and new index. This dance is dubbed as the “Google Dance.” Its effects are predominantly dreaded by those who follow unethical means and black-hat SEO tactics.

During an update Google draws its search results from ten thousand servers. But here the database is surplus so they can’t be updated in synchronization. This being the reason Google updates each server with the new index, one at a time. These updates at times become complicated, particularly when two major sites located on separate servers happen to have a close linking bond. This kind of incongruity contributes a great deal of change in page ranks. But eventually once everything gets settled, Google places your site in proper place. Google’s index is in fact a big, disorganized database of information that Google searches very quickly. At the same time it allows a site to remain accessible through other sites that are linked to it when the index is taking place. Usually, Google during its update do not let any site suffer for too long, but if you generating your traffic solely from Google, you will see a slight drop for a short period of time. This drop is often followed by an abrupt increase in your rankings 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. Per chance, if a part of Google crashes down, the users can still use the services of search engine. Each data center has its own individual IP address (If one DNS server doesn't know how to translate a particular domain name, it asks another one, and so on, until the correct IP address is returned). These IP addresses are managed by the Domain Name System (DNS). Google’s IP address can change every five minutes. This assessment of time allows the datacenters to toggle between their datacenters regularly to spread the search load. This way, Google queries are directed to different data centers by changing DNS records.

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