phil ringnalda

From the There’s Always An Excuse To Stroke Your Own Ego Department:

Looks like I haven’t linked to the lovely and very useful Google Dance Tool, and what better way than to point out that as of right now, it looks like I’m the world’s number two Phil, up from number three last month. Take that, font-boy! (And who is that at number six? Could it be Phil?)

What’s the Google Dance, you ask? Things have gotten a little fuzzy over the past year, as Google tries to get things indexed faster to meet the needs of people searching for news and current events, but even now, they do a monthly update of their index, adding new things and shuffling the rankings of pages in the search results. For most of the month, www.google.com, www2.google.com, and www3.google.com show the exact same results, but for whatever reason, while the update is going on their results vary, sometimes showing what the new results will be, sometimes showing results that will never be seen again, and those changing results are the Google Dance. It’s particularly helpful to search engine optimizers, since Googlebot traditionally does its most extensive and import crawl during or immediately after the update, so the sooner you find out that something worked or failed, the more likely you are to be able to either do more of it or repair the damage before the next update.