Questions about the Google Dance

So I see the Google Dance being mentioned quite a bit here, but am confused as to what it actually is. For instance, how long does a site take to get past the google dance? also, when I searched site:http://www.mysite.com earlier today, it said no results. However, when I searched again a couple hours later, my site came up. and then I searched again after building some backlinks, and it couldn't find it again. Is this just the google dance, or am I sandboxed/deindexed??

When people refer to the "google dance" they are generally talking about any changes in algorithm or when google changes it's rules, etc...

In regards to your site, that is a bit weird. Your site has probably been either sanboxed or de-indexed for some reason. Really hard to say why. it could be anything that raised a red flag with google (building links too fast, too many links to homepage with zero internal links, scraped content...you name it...there are tons of things you can do wrong)

Just keep at it. Build links to your site but not too fast at first. And be sure to shoot some links at your internal pages as well to look more natural.

Strange...so am I screwed? How long does it take to get out of the sandbox? I recently used a script posted on here to blast 70 my site to get 70 backlinks and ping them....would that cause this?

Keep building backlinks at a steady pace and you'll be fine. From what I've read/experienced, google doesn't like when there's a huge influx of backlinks and then nothing for a few weeks then another huge influx of backlinks. Steady wins the game.

And re the google dance, I consider it to be when my sites jump up and down in the serps. Going from spot #3 to spot # 103 then back again. It's a pain but it happens to everyone. I've not encountered the index/deindex thing - that's strange!

Hooray, my site is reindexed . Wait it out and you'll be golden!