I wanted to inform you that the “Google Dance” has begun. This is for April’s update, even though we are now in May.
Google has just performed a massive, and I mean massive flush of their database. As I reported last month, Google was looking to remove all affiliate links and Guestbook entries from their link popularity scale. While I have not gone through significant testing on this, it looks like they did do just that. Yahoo! went from 661,000 links to 384,000 links in this update! My corporate site lost over 60% of our links. It is clear, Google is stepping up the need of quality links to sites as a measure for their PageRank criteria.
You can check the status of your site by going to: The Google Dance Tool. Simply substitute your domain name in the place of “yahoo.com”. The resulting pages are the number of links you have pointing to your site that Google recognizes. The current database is listed on the top, and the two next databases, www2 and www3, are the test databases. The difference is your increase or decrease in link popularity. As you are probably aware, the “Google Dance” is when Google begins to test their monthly update as the different datacenters “go live” and are tested. It is significant as it is at this time when each site’s new PageRank is calculated.
The database will be “in flux” for the next 3-5 days. I will inform you of when the Google Dance is complete, and you will also get an email from us shortly regarding the change in link popularity and potential change in PageRank due to this new update.
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