Understanding the Google Dance.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 17-07-2009

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Whats the Google dance? Well, its really just a fun phrase for when Google updates its index. This occurs regularly, once a month, and can cause a lot of movement in rankings, meaning that its come to be feared by many in the SEO industry and anticipated by others. The update isnt just one sudden switch, though, as each index update takes several days to complete. During this update the searches seem to dance between the old index and new index thats the Google dance.

So why does it happen? Well, Google pulls its results from over ten thousand servers, and they cant all be updated at once Google would have to go down for the update. Instead, each server is updated with the new index, one at a time. This can cause very strange behavior in the page rank process if two major sites located on separate servers happen to have a close linking bond. These sorts of separations are interesting and can contribute to a great deal of change and motion in page ranks. The most important thing to keep in mind is that eventually Google will get you into your proper place. Generally, if you behave, you will not be thrown down for long by the odd activity that can occur when Google is in the process of updating its index for your server (or for the servers of your favorite link partners.

One common misunderstanding is the idea that Google controls which server each kind of information is coming from, and so stores similar information on the same server. Googles index doesnt work this way its a big, disorganized mass of information that Google searches very quickly. This is a blessing in disguise because it allows your site to remain reachable via other sites that are related to it when the index is taking place. Your site generally wont suffer for too long when an update is taking place anyway, but if you are heavily dependent on Google results, you will see a slight drop for a short period of time. This drop is often followed by a slight spike especially if your page rank has increased since the last index.

The 10,000 servers that Google uses are distributed between seven datacenters all over the world. Google doesnt keep all of those eggs in one basket they want to be able to lose one datacenter and have the rest survive. If part of Google goes down, people can still use the search engine and as I said before, this allows your site to be accessed via related sites if the server holding your sites index happens to go down. The datacenters that Google has put into play are enormous in comparison to most datacenters around the world. Google rivals some of the largest datacenters in the world with each of its datacenters and is probably the largest in the world if all were combined into one.

You see, the time-to-live for www.google.com is only five minutes that means that Googles IP address can change every five minutes. This allows them to switch between their datacenters regularly, spreading the search load between them intelligently and routing around any damage. If you constantly entered the same datacenter with every search that you placed it would almost certainly fry within twenty four hours. Considering the number of users on Google each and every day, it is surprising that ten thousand servers is enough. A server can only handle so much traffic in a day and Google insures that it can hold more than any other service on the internet.

The datacenters updating their indexes at different times causes Google to do its dance. Unless youre looking for your websites ranking, youd never notice this as your site is normally available at all times. The unfortunate bit is that often times you will lose your page ranking for a short period of time or your site will seem to have a lower number of pages indexed by Google. If you insure that you have several hundred pages available on Google at all times you will most likely be able to provide all of your content at all times either directly or indirectly.

Understanding Stop Words, and How to Avoid Them.

Filed Under (SEO Tips) by admin on 16-07-2009

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To understand how to avoid stop words, you first have to understand what stop words are. Search engines have words or phrases that are considered stop words. When a spider or crawler encounters one of these stop words, they will immediately leave your website and any information they gathered from it will not be saved in their database. This means that your website will not be indexed. If your website is already indexed in a searched engine, the crawler will come back to see if there are updates — and if it finds stop words when it does this, then your site could get banned from the search engine. You will not be allowed to remove the words and re-submit: its too late.

Different search engines have different lists, but some are nearly universal usually words that refer to sites with graphic sexual content, or other adult material. We cant really put a list here, or youd never find this page! You should be able to tell what they are for the most part, but remember, pornographic web sites will often get indexed as well. The norm for search engines is that they will attempt to avoid content that is illegal. When they encounter adult oriented sites, they will generally only ban sites that contain especially vulgar or illegal materials. The problem being that many of these sorts of sites will use gateway pages that have no content other than click here to enter. These sites are less likely to be caught with the stop word censors.

These arent the only stop words, however. Some search engines create different lists of stop words for each different kind of website. What does this mean? Well, the algorithms which rank the pages determine how many times on a page a keyword is listed. Keep in mind that there are people trying to keyword stuff their pages to improve their ranking. If a word is not relevant to your site, dont list it in your key words. This is one easy way to avoid losing your index privileges. There is no reason to try to lure people into your site on key words that dont apply as they will not stick around long enough to provide you with revenue anyway.

Now you might be asking what keyword stuffing is. Keyword stuffing is when someone uses the same keywords over and over again in the meta tags and the content of the web page. If youre searching the web and you come across a website that seems to be ranked far too highly, then keyword stuffing is usually to blame. The search engines work hard to stop people from using these kinds of tactics, and usually de-list sites that they find to be using them. Thats why some sites can be listed near the top for a while, before one day seemingly disappearing altogether.

Some sites, however, get ejected for repeated keywords, even though these sites arent trying to keyword stuff. This is where keyword analysis comes into play. To avoid repeating the same word or phrase too many times, you need to analyze your pages before you submit them you wouldnt want your efforts at finding good keywords to go to waste.

Although search engine optimization is a long-term effort, the processes and rules change frequently, without any warning. There are, however, tools available that will help you to stay on top of whats going on in SEO. Many tools can be tried out at no cost, letting you try before you buy. There are so many to choose from that you cant just start downloading them you will want to read the information on each tool before you make a decision.

By using these tools before you submit your pages to any search engines, you will fully understand “stop words” and how to avoid them! You need to keep in mind, though, that different search engines have different stop word lists, so words that dont matter to one search engine can stop your site from being listed on another.

There are also some words that arent included in searches, such as and, of, the, and other small words. You should keep these words out of your meta tags, as theyre just a waste of space.