The Google Dance

The Google dance is where a website will jump up and down the search positions. Google may rank a website on the front page of Google but for whatever reason will decide it isn’t trusted enough to keep it’s position there. We see websites ranked on page1 one day, only to be on page6 the next, and this can happen over a period of months. This happens a lot with new websites but can also happen with older websites that start a new SEO campaign for a competitive keyword. The position will become stable when Google decides that the web page can be trusted. We’ve found that this usually occurs when a new website has aged enough, which can be between 6 and 12 months, or when Google recognizes a natural link building pattern towards the website. For example if a web page has had no link building towards it and maybe has only 10 backlinks overall. When an SEO campaign is started which generates 100 backlinks per day, Google will consider this unnatural behavior. It may take a few months of this link pattern of 100 links per day coming in to then convince Google that the regular link pattern of this page is 100 links per day. It is then that it will stableize and the Google dancing will cease.