Why does the Google Dance happen?

Is it to test how well your site performs with a small amount of clicks? Is it to make SEOs go crazy? Or?

I think it's mostly cause of algo changes. However, I am not completely sure about this.

elfgirl said:

I think it's mostly cause of algo changes. However, I am not completely sure about this.

Click to expand...

Do they really change the algorithm that often? My ranks change like every 20 mins.

It's a test(apparently), where they will move your site around the results and check whether the SEO changes in pattern. If you're making thousands of backlinks per day to your site, then you see your site dance, and suddenly backlinks stop being created in a panic, chances are the backlinks are unnatural. People recommend to ignore the dance and continue building links at the same rate throughout the movements, to make the backlinks seem natural. This could also be entirely made up and not be real at all, but welcome to SEO.

The official answer from Google is that it's figuring out where it should place you in the rankings. They have various algos that I am assuming are ran depending on how much authority/trust a domain has. When it's a fresh domain, Google doesn't trust it, so it checks everything to make sure it looks legit. As the domain gains more authority (by getting authority domains to link to it), Google trusts it more and runs less checks each time you build a link. My theory - that is.

Every click is worth $. When you reach a certain number of clicks, Google will lower you a bit. They keep throttling WWW traffic to keep their profit at a maximum, round-robying several sites at the top.

There's also the big dance which is when they change the algorithms big time and do a big crawl of the WWW. But they're also constantly changing their algos on a small scale which also influences results.