Google Dance in Detail

Once a month, Google updates it entire index. During this time, sites and pages experience instability in PageRank and rank positions. The update is called Google dance. This has been a popular point of conversation among webmasters. Here is an explanation of the process and ways on how to check a page’s PR during the update.

Google Dance Explained

Google dance refers to the index update that Google performs every month. The update is done by recalculating the Page Ranks of each of the pages that are included in the index – pages that Google have crawled. The update is not as easy as others may think of it. Calculating the PageRank takes several days to complete. It takes a number of calculations before Google can actually arrive with the PR of a specific page. Since the index is so large, Google has to do countless calculations.

During the update process, search results are unstable. Some pages may have reduced PRs, some have disappeared and some have changed rank positions. The results can be said as fluctuating, thus, the term “Google Dance” was made up. The update takes place on the last third of each month most of the time.

PageRank during Google Dance

How will you be able to check a page’s new PR during the Google dance? Google has a number of data centers which can show a page’s PR during the update process. These data centers provide the same current PR value of a certain page. During the “dance”, these data centers are also updated. As such, they can reveal the new PR of a particular page throughout the process. However, if a page’s PR is not bound to increase, there will be no changes on the PR value that these data centers will show.

To be able to check a page’s PR through the Google’s data centers, Google toolbar must be installed and the PR indicator must be displayed. What happens is that every time a certain page is received by the browser, Google toolbar requests for its PR from the data centers. Below table shows the Google Data Centers:

Data Centers

A better understanding of Google dance will somehow reduce your concerns about the “fluctuating results”. After days of instability, you can look forward to for a higher PR value!

Google dance will gradually increase a page’s PR value after the update. For more information on how to ensure a higher PR after Google dance, please see our Web Marketing Services.