SEM/SEO

What is the Google Dance?

Google Dance as defined in the community maintained wikipedia is:

All differences in the Google index on different DataCenters are called by SEO experts ‘GoogleDance’. It simply means that You can get many different results when You just click search or try another machine, browser etc.

Why does Google Dance happen?

The main reason for the Google Dance is a propagation issue. Google has more than 1000+ datacenters around the world. And there are some people dedicated into finding the IP addresses of all Google datacenters.

Although not all Google dances are attributed to propagation. Sometimes these can also be algorithmic in nature. Where some datacenters are testing a new behaviour on how Google will work and they will compare this with the rest of the datacenters to determine which one they believe runs better. The most recent announced algorithmic change was the rollout of the Google Big Daddy datacenters early March 2006.

The Google dance has been popular, but we have also been observing a Yahoo Dance and MSN/Live Dance with the recent SERPs for Ituloy Angsulong.

Wordpress is a very good CMS tool for SEO. Wordpress has many SEO related plugins to make SEO and maintaining content for frequently updated sites even easier. Although Wordpress was really designed to be a blog and not really designed for any other purpose although it still can be used for other purposes.

A good option is Drupal whose CMS can be optimized for SEO purposes and can be used not only for blogs, but as a full-fledge CMS system. So this can be implemented on corporate websites that have oftenly updated content but at the same time can be optimized well for SEO purposes.

If you are in search of an SEO Consulting company for Drupal Optimization, SEO Position seems to be promising, as they have existed for 5 years already and they also have they call Social Media Optimization (SMO)

PageRank is a measure of importance of a website Google uses which is a scale of 1 to 10. Where 10 is the highest. A high PR does not always assure high ranking for your targetted keywords. All other SEO factors like keyword density, code to content ratio still are what you look at in ranking, but for two websites with nearly the same value, quality, quantity in various SEO factors, the site with the higher Pagerank will most probably rank higher. Pagerank can be viewed like a measure of credibility. And if your website gets links from high PR website increase it’s own PR as well.

Pagerank if updated often, although I am not sure how often it is updated, but what is displayed on Google’s toolbar is not as updated as you think. Google Pagerank changes 3 to 4 times a year, about every 3 to 4 months. The next PR update is expected sometime this coming January 2007. To check the PR of various websites, you can simply install the latest Firefox browser with the Google toolbar. It’s a safe and secure browser and the Google toolbar will have even more useful tools aside from the Pagerank display alone.

When there is a Pagerank update, not all Google datacenters are updated right away. And my favorite Pagerank checker on various Google datacenters is here.

There also has been some reports that the Pagerank can be faked, and there are some blackhat SEO websites, blogs and forums out there saying how to cheat Google Pagerank, and basically all it is doing is displaying the Pagerank of another website and showing in the browser another website. But it has also been reported in SEO communities of Pagerank errors where some websites mysteriously get extremely low or extremely high PR for no known logical reason at all. And even I have just experienced that with another website of mine that barely has inbound links from other websites. It has large amount of internal linking all from the same domain and it was given a PR7 for some reason. Getting links from other high PR websites is the objective of many SEO professionals that they decide to buy links from other websites. While some websites who are really into SEO, willing sell links. And as the higher the Pagerank of a site gets, the higher the price get as these are very much sought after links that come from these high Pagerank good place to buy links are from Text Link Ads. They are sorted by topic and you can also view the Pagerank, Alexa traffic and all other details of the site. SEO is said to work best if the links you get are from site with similar topics.