What is Google Dance?

the google dance

• Hi there we were up on google again after a 2 week absence. We were up for one day, June 5 and then gone again. Could you enlighten? brighten? We are a small band site mostly of graphics but we have all the alt tags in place. www.redshagcarpet.com, we love google.

• Answer:

  Hi again Lonni, it's great to see a return questioner. The 'Google Dance', or the process of Google renewing it's index of the Internet, can sometimes result in accidental omission of some websites. With 3 billion pages to catch-up on, it is inevitable that some will temporarily go missing for one reason or another. The software which Google uses to record Internet content, commonly known as a 'spider', browses sites by jumping between hyperlinks just like a human reader would do. Each time the spider visits a new page, the content will be indexed and it will become visible in subsequent search results. As quick and efficient as this method may be, it does mean that sites will occasionally be missed out accidentally, purely because the spider cannot necessarily visit every single link it comes across. Your site is currently included in the 'All the Web' search engine index, and I used this to determine how many incoming links your site has. At the moment, there is just one, from http://www.backwoodswillow.com/. I'm sure that as time goes on and your site becomes more established, the number of links to the Red Shag Carpet will increase, but at the moment it only takes a bit of bad luck on your part to be overlooked by the spider. It is also possible that your server had some temporary down-time when the Google spider visited. Google's official status on this is as follows: Google Information for Webmasters ://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html "Your site may not have been reachable when we tried to crawl it because of network or hosting problems. When this happens, we retry multiple times, but if the site cannot be crawled, it will not be listed in our current index. If it was a transient problem, your site will likely show up in the next index, which will be completed in a few weeks." In the mean time, it may be beneficial to submit www.redshagcarpet.com to a couple of online directories. These will provide useful links to your site, and in the case of the Open Directory Project, will actually lead to your inclusion in the Google Directory. Yahoo Directory: Suggest a URL http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/ Open Directory Project: Add a site http://dmoz.org/add.html Another possible explanation for your disappearance from the index is that the spider decided there was not enough content on your site. From the human browsers point of view, redshagcarpet.com is very aesthetically pleasing, and this probably reinforces some positive branding upon the band. However, to a search engine spider who cannot interpret images, although you have included alternative text tags, there is still not much content to analyse. Using the 'Spider Simulator' at Search Engine World: Spider Simulator http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi it is possible to see your site from the spider's perspective. The content gleaned from www.redshagcarpet.com is as follows: " This Edmonton band will bring the rock and meet you on the dance floor Sidetrack Cafe Red Shag Carpet Quotes contact the band Red Shag Carpet News Edmonton Music scene Edmonton Fringe Festival Western Canadian Tour this summer! " As you can see, a spider will just extract any text from the page and assess its content accordingly. If you compare the volume content returned from redshagcarpet.com with another page, for example www.searchengineworld.com, you will notice there relatively little for a spider to work with. This problem is easily solved by including extra descriptive text on the page. We have already discussed the use of 'invisible' keyword inclusion in your earlier question, and this is not a good idea. However, just a couple of paragraphs (of visible text) giving a general description of the band located below the images would not hurt the 'look' of the site substantially, but could be very useful to search engine spiders. A fourth potential reason Google may avoid the site, is the inclusion of large volumes of javascript at the start of the HTML. If it is possible to remove or minimise any of this, the spider will notice the useful content being nearer the top of the HTML, and will assign greater importance to it. As a side note, I also notice the inclusion of the meta tag "<meta NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="31 Days">" within the HTML head of the index.html. This indicates to the search spider how frequently it should re-index the page. Google have not expressed an official opinion on the use of this tag, but I tend to think that the spider will not pay much heed to it. However, there is no point in limiting the frequency of updates to every 31 days, so I suggest removing the tag. A final possible explanation for Google to not index www.redshagcarpet.com would be that if you did briefly use the technique of 'invisible keyword inclusion' then Google may have removed you from the index. If you think this might be the case, and you are still not indexed in a month's time, it may be worthwhile emailing [email protected] and asking them to re-include the site. In conclusion, I think it most likely that you have simply been caught up in the monthly Google Dance and that things will soon revert to normal. However, I hope the other points I raised will be useful to you. Some extra sites which may be of interest include: Google Information for Webmasters ://www.google.com/webmasters/ Search Guild: Google http://www.searchguild.com/viewforum.php?f=1&sid=06aa8600d65505aae97fa5ce1f4dcf30 During my research I also noticed a related question answered by Webadept-ga which gives a similar explanation from a different person's perspective. Reading this may also be useful: Google Answers: My web page disappeared from the searches http://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id=211151 I hope that this answer reassures you that it is most likely that Red Shag Carpet are only temporarily excluded from the search results, and that with a few minor alterations you can be confident of remaining in the index when the Google spider next returns. As per usual, if you would like clarification of an area, please do not hesitate to ask before rating my answer. Good luck with your webmastership! mcfly :) **Search strategy** google dance google search optimization OR optimisation webmasters google google spider