Have You Been Effected By The "Google Dance"

I started building links on a 3 year old site I have just a few months ago, after putting about 30 backlinks across 3 day's my site dropped completely off the map for about 3 weeks. When it did come back I lost rank on my number 1 keyword (the one I used for backlinking) from top of page 2 (number 11) to page 5 somewhere. I was very bummed :-(

On the flip side I also started backlinking another site at the same time (a new site) and it's on page one for my keyword and never dropped out.

No I tend to ignore Myths ...

James

Yeah I have had this same experience. Sometimes my site falls back even further, but the important thing is that it usually comes back in 3-7 days even stronger.

One of my site's pages which I tried building back links to went from page 10 to page 2 within 3 days. However, as I continued to build back links to it, the page went to page 3 for about 2 days.. It is now still in page 2 despite building back links continuously.. Don't know when I'll breach page one with it.. I'll still continue building back links to it though without regard whether or not it will experience the Google Dance..

Hey guys - the "google dance" hasn't existed for six years. I don't know why everyone is saying that.

btw...here's a good article to read about why rankings are not a good way to measure success - 5 Reasons Why Rankings Are A Poor Measure Of Success

Understand too that Google is in the midst of rolling out their new algorithm (Caffeine). This is undoubtedly monkeying with the SERPs, and probably will for some time to come.

Here's a good article about some of the apparent changes in this new algo: SiteProNews: Google Caffeine and The New Ranking Factors

I think backlinks will be downplayed, while things like bounce rates, page loading speed, and quality of content will rise in terms of importance. Maybe the most interesting part of this to me is that the author surmises that Google might be giving more weight to social bookmarks. I don't know why they would, since in my opinion that's almost as easy to artificially inflate as any other backlinking scheme, including buying links. I think Google screwed themselves up by focusing so heavily on links as votes. They never really were except in a tiny % of cases. I can remember doing link exchanges for the purposes of artificially gaining higher rankings before Google was a household name. If Google's truly trying to give its users the best choices first when they do a search, it's always been about the content on the page. Nothing else can possibly be as important.

I believe it is normal for newly created websites that has just been added to google index to experience a huge jump and later drops down the ranking. Usually it is called a temporary boost. As for established websites, we have also seen a google dance but that was more notable few months ago when serp position was bouncing up and down like crazy. Well, at least, lately serp ranking has been more stable but who knows when it will happen again.

Zeus66 is defo right about google downgrading backlinks. Seems like backlinking will become a useless method of SEO in the near future. I'm sure I read somewhere recently that they were taking page loading times and web 2.0 content as priority when page ranking.