Google does weird things at night, when everyone is asleep. I set up a script to track my position on Google for a particular keyword, and ran it every minute using the Cron feature. Whenever the SERP changed, I would be notified via e-mail. It was all good for the first day, but overnight, I had some crazy Google Dancing. Here are the emails I got: (When the script started running, I had the 2nd position) Thu 10/5/2006 3:04 AM: The ranking fell from 2 to 52 Thu 10/5/2006 3:05 AM: The ranking rose from 52 to 2 Thu 10/5/2006 3:33 AM: The ranking fell from 2 to 33 Thu 10/5/2006 3:34 AM: The ranking rose from 33 to 2 Thu 10/5/2006 4:14 AM: The ranking fell from 2 to 23 Thu 10/5/2006 4:16 AM: The ranking rose from 23 to 6 Thu 10/5/2006 4:18 AM: The ranking rose from 6 to 2 Thu 10/5/2006 4:45 AM: The ranking fell from 2 to 52 Thu 10/5/2006 4:46 AM: The ranking rose from 52 to 2 Thu 10/5/2006 4:49 AM: The ranking fell from 2 to 33 Thu 10/5/2006 4:50 AM: The ranking fell from 33 to 35 Thu 10/5/2006 4:51 AM: The ranking rose from 35 to 2 Thu 10/5/2006 4:52 AM: The ranking fell from 2 to 33 Thu 10/5/2006 4:54 AM: The ranking rose from 33 to 22 Thu 10/5/2006 4:56 AM: The ranking fell from 22 to 32 Thu 10/5/2006 4:57 AM: The ranking rose from 32 to 16 Thu 10/5/2006 4:58 AM: The ranking fell from 16 to 23 Thu 10/5/2006 5:00 AM: The ranking fell from 23 to 35 Thu 10/5/2006 5:08 AM: The ranking rose from 35 to 2 Some of these results are from different DC's and some are from the same one's. The script uses Google.com for the results. For all the visual people here is a graph showing the Google Dance in 2 hours: This was absolutely astounding to me! I knew that Google had varied results while updating its DC's but I didn't know that there was such a big difference in positions.
By everyone I assume that you mean everyone in the US, (or actually in your timezone)? Good job anyways. FFMG
I doubt those results are actually down to the datacentre itself changing. More likely the datacentre you were accessing changed. Can you provide data on which datacentre each result was pulled from, if that's on the axis of the graph it's difficult to make out.
I did not get my final PR on all datacenters yet. But my traffic started to increase.. I guess my inner pages started to obtain their PRs.
The PR update now would have no effect on traffic. The PR update we are seeing now if from almost two months ago. Realtime PR is constantly updated, so it's effects don't just come into play during an update, they've been factored in long before.
It is called a google update mate. And I wouldn't recommend doing that. During google updates everything is strange. Just wait till it is done. If you try and figure it all out you will just ruin it.
I heard this before too. But i dont agree this fully. Because in my opinion, if this is so simple then there is no need to have data centers! So data centers exist just to show us toolbar PR? As far as i see they are also returning organic traffic! And if they dont know my PR and start to learn this in these update session then obviously they dont return me the traffic i am expecting after the PR update. So why these updates take so much time! As far as i guess, in the update the data servers also exchanges the data they have between each other. So i guess the PR update directly should effect my traffic! (like user behaviors. (who clicked to which site in which region) I am not in this industry for much time. So i am sure there are lots of people here knowing more than me.. But this is why i asked the traffic and PR-update relation in several threads here recently! And depending the answers i get, there is no clear explanation and i will decide on the result once this update finished since thisismy first update i am seriosuly looking at.. You are right there may not be any serious relation! But the update takes so much time and the data centers should be there for some reason. And they should hold some important data (why they are called "data server") I did not research on this in detail but as far as i know they are serving different regions and they are supposed to give independent decision for the search engine users. And if Google is not trying to fool us with this Google dance, they should exchange huge amount of data. And this should only reflect to regions once the update is finished! (or even while updating) Anyway, i will be sad if my traffic does not change but i am ready for it too And one more point is that my sites got PR5 from PR0 is very very new. (a few months old and i added hundereds of quality articles in that period) So the effect of PR update may no be noticable for mature sites but it can be for new sites. And because of my previous experience, i dont believe google will return me this level of traffic for so much effort. But i may be wrong. Google has lots of surprises
All the results were pulled from Google.com... that website returns results from the most available datacenter, and therefore the datacenter can change (and hence the results can change). But what struck me about the diffrences was that there was a HUGE diffrence is SERPS. A 1-10 difference might be understandable, but 1-50, that's a lot.
I've noticed some pretty large movements recently. Try again in a month and see if you get the same results.