What is Google Dance?
Google makes you dance
Google dance refers to a phenomenon that happens during Google updates that leads to fluctuations happening to websites’ ranking on Google’s result page.
Before 2003, Google updated its algorithm every 36 days or 10 times a year. During this updating period which usually took 5 to 6 days, rankings would change slightly or significantly. Nowadays, Google performs its updates every week to ease the effects of ranking volatility. Even though Google’s strategy to update its algorithm more frequently is quite effective, the fluctuation still happens, though less severely.
Why does ranking volatility still happen?
There are an endless number of new websites coming to existence all around the world. All these websites are eager to be indexed by Google and be shown on Google result pages as soon as possible. Also, many new contents appear on currently existing websites from all around the globe every second that must be evaluated and ranked by Google crawlers. Such a complicated task for Google algorithm is the main reason that causes fluctuations on your website’s rank on Google.
What we need to know about Google Dance?
Firstly, you must accept the fact that slight changes in your ranking on Google is normal. As your competitors are trying to move higher on Google search results, they may get your position and push you down slightly. Hence, slight changes in your ranking doesn’t have anything to do with Google dance. Besides, as Google updates its algorithm more frequently, significant change to your ranking is not likely to happen, so if your rank on a specific keyword dropped from page 1 to page 5 for example, another reason might be causing such a downfall.
Why does the Google Dance matter?
Google dance or ranking fluctuation does matter, as it can have a significant impact on the traffic of your website. It goes without saying that traffic is the most important factor for websites of any kind. Hence, everything that affects your website’s traffic is important. In conclusion, it is crucial for you as a business owner or a SEO specialist to have a deep understanding of Google Dance and how to deal with it when it occurs.
Is it possible to avoid ranking fluctuations?
The short answer is No! Google Dance is something out of our hand and it happens due to Google’s algorithm updates. However, there are effective ways that make you able to minimize the impacts of Google updates on your website’s rank that we will go through shortly. Don’t forget that Google likes patience, consistency and persistency. Hence, by moving on the right track that we will explain in the next paragraph, everything will be sorted by Google.
How to face with Google Dance?
The most valuable advice we can make is to continue with your SEO strategy and nothing else! It is fully acceptable that losing your rank is scary and would result in less traffic to your website. However, you must believe in the fact that it is normal for your website to fluctuate during Google updates. You must avoid making immediate decisions to make emergency changes to your website, content, keywords and SEO strategy. In many cases, prompt changes to your website makes things even worse and pushes your website even lower on Google search result page.
Google Dance and SEO
Like mentioned before, you must keep working based on your SEO strategy by creating quality content, link building and other tasks that are defined on your SEO plan. At the end of the day, by your due diligence, consistency and persistency, your website’s rank stabilizes and Google updates would have very minor impact on your rank on Google.
Even though it is highly recommended to keep going with your SEO plan, don’t take us wrong. SEO plan must be monitored very carefully and SEO performance must be measured within a reasonable time frame. There are several methods and good tools available to measure a SEO plan performance. We would like to recommend reading How to evaluate my website’s SEO for a deep understanding on how to measure your SEO performance.
Bottomline
Even though Google has made very valuable changes to its updating procedure, fluctuation in websites’ ranking still happens. This is what is called Google Dance. The impact of Google Dance can be significant, if your website design is not professional enough for facing such a volatility. A well-designed website that performs a professional SEO plan would still be affected by Google updates, though it would be minor.
As a conclusion, to be on the safe side, you must have your website professionally designed, or if you already own a website, make sure that it is not outdated and is in compliance with SEO standards. Furthermore, make sure to have a proper SEO plan in place and monitor it from time to time to see how it goes and take prompt action if it’s not performing to your satisfaction.
In case you have any query about your website design, SEO plan or your current ranking on Google, we are more than happy to help.
Please contact us and ask for a free consultation meeting, so you will have the chance to discuss your needs and we will get back to you with a solution that perfectly fulfills your needs.