Dancing with Google’s spiders

Just because Google is its own search engine, it is important to understand that SEO does in fact matter to them just as much as the rest of us. Seriously, just think about it for a minute…

The industrious spider “bots” that crawl around the web on behalf of Google, the world’s biggest search engine, evoke both fear and reverence. Late last year the bots swept through the world’s web servers to scrutinise some 8 billion web pages and determine their new rankings in Google’s search results. As Google tweaks its mighty ranking algorithms, and applies them to the constantly changing pages of the web, different sites shuffle up and down wildly in its search rankings, repeatedly gaining and losing ground. This operation, which takes place two or three times a year, is known as a “Google Dance”.

Like hurricanes, Google Dances are given names, such as Bourbon, Gilligan and Florida, often by commentators at a website called webmasterworld.com. Jagger, the two-week dance that began late last October, moved through servers in three waves, eliciting chatter in internet forums. “Been kicked off the face of the index by jagger1,” reads a typical entry. “Will try not to panic til after jagger3.” Source: The Economist

[tags]google spiders,industrious spider,google dances,commentators,webmasterworld.com[/tags]