Google Dance Begun

The Google dance appears to have begun yesterday and there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth in the optimization community. The Webmaster World forum thread discussing the update already has over 430 posts since it started yesterday morning. What is the Google dance? It occurs when Google is launching a new database, first on www2.google.com or www3.google.com and then eventually on the main site. I can take several days until the whole new dance to finish. So right now on the main www.google.com, the bulk of their database appears to have come from an early August crawl. The database on www2 is from a late August early September crawl. So searchers take note. Try www2 for the more current records, but expect changes over the next few days from what you got at Google earlier this week.

So why all the frantic discussion in the forums. It seems that Google may have made a more significant change than usual to their relevance ranking algorithms. According to a related Webmaster World thread the changes have moved Microsoft out of the top spot for a phrase search on "go to hell" and perhaps has increased the importance of anchor text from the Open Directory. Again, the point for searchers is that the results will likely change compared to what you have seen. Whether better or worse relevance ranking remains to be seen, but it will probably depend greatly on the search terms.