Online Reputation Management, SEO, Web Development
Dancing with Google is a Good Thing!
By | Published: December 3, 2010
Many SEOs talk about the “Google Dance” and I figured it would be good to talk about these for a bit to clear up some confusion.
Today we had a client we’ve been working with for 9 days to rank them for a specific keyword. They started out in position #54 when we started our efforts and promptly shot down as low as #182 before the weekend. They noticed the dramatic drop and wondered what the heck was going on. Were we killing their site?!
We smiled a big smile (sitting at our desks, not creepily in person!) and explained that the site was doing the Google Dance and that’s a “Good Thing”. Fast forward to today and they jumped all the way up to #2 on the first page. So from #54 to #182 to #2 in the span of 9 days. Not bad, right?
When a site gets new links, Google needs to weigh how important and trustworthy those new links are, and then updates the SERPs accordingly. If the site gets an unusual amount of links then Google has to figure out where to put them. While Google does the number crunching, the site will usually drop in the SERPs. This process of going down and up is called the Google Dance. Anyway, after a couple of days or a week the site will bounce back, usually stronger than before. This dancing up and down in the results may happen multiple times, depending on the site and keyword chosen, but it shouldn’t be a cause for worry because it almost always results in a positive movement up the rankings.
So what determines how far you drop and for how long? Nobody knows for certain, but there are some observations that we’ve made over the years. A well established site with a lot of links can receive a lot of new inbound links with very little impact. If a site is new or has very little link velocity (speed of new links being obtained), then it can’t take many new links. The harder a site is hit with new links, the further it may go down in the rankings and the longer it can take to come back. The feedback loop on link building is super long, so it’s impossible for the casual SEO to understand the nuances of the various link types and how they may impact rankings. And if you hit the link building process too hard your site can be sandboxed – the equivalent of a virtual death penalty for your site.
Two more factors to talk about later are the Google Sandbox and Bad Link Neighborhoods. Those are important to factor into any link building strategy as they can really negatively impact your rankings.
We can now add a new happy client to our list of successes, and we’ll work to help them get that coveted #1 spot!
Dancing with Google is a Good Thing!
Many SEOs talk about the “Google Dance” and I figured it would be good to talk about these for a bit to clear up some confusion.
Today we had a client we’ve been working with for 9 days to rank them for a specific keyword. They started out in position #54 when we started our efforts and promptly shot down as low as #182 before the weekend. They noticed the dramatic drop and wondered what the heck was going on. Were we killing their site?!
We smiled a big smile (sitting at our desks, not creepily in person!) and explained that the site was doing the Google Dance and that’s a “Good Thing”. Fast forward to today and they jumped all the way up to #2 on the first page. So from #54 to #182 to #2 in the span of 9 days. Not bad, right?
When a site gets new links, Google needs to weigh how important and trustworthy those new links are, and then updates the SERPs accordingly. If the site gets an unusual amount of links then Google has to figure out where to put them. While Google does the number crunching, the site will usually drop in the SERPs. This process of going down and up is called the Google Dance. Anyway, after a couple of days or a week the site will bounce back, usually stronger than before. This dancing up and down in the results may happen multiple times, depending on the site and keyword chosen, but it shouldn’t be a cause for worry because it almost always results in a positive movement up the rankings.
So what determines how far you drop and for how long? Nobody knows for certain, but there are some observations that we’ve made over the years. A well established site with a lot of links can receive a lot of new inbound links with very little impact. If a site is new or has very little link velocity (speed of new links being obtained), then it can’t take many new links. The harder a site is hit with new links, the further it may go down in the rankings and the longer it can take to come back. The feedback loop on link building is super long, so it’s impossible for the casual SEO to understand the nuances of the various link types and how they may impact rankings. And if you hit the link building process too hard your site can be sandboxed – the equivalent of a virtual death penalty for your site.
Two more factors to talk about later are the Google Sandbox and Bad Link Neighborhoods. Those are important to factor into any link building strategy as they can really negatively impact your rankings.
We can now add a new happy client to our list of successes, and we’ll work to help them get that coveted #1 spot!