Making Money Online - The Dreaded Google Dance

People talk about the "google dance," and rather like some esoteric religious tome, there are an awful lot of people out there who claim to have some magical insider knowledge. There is only one word for this - bollocks!

The term, "google dance," is used to describe the somewhat erratic nature of ranking a web page for a given search term in the search engine results - specifically google's search engine results. After three years of working online, what I Can say for sure is that there is no way to predict for certain what the google dance has in store for you and a web page and search term. I will give you an example and you can make of them what you will.

I recently set up a new website - and if you want to make money by blogging - or any other way of making money online - you will always be setting up new websites unless you are extremely lucky. The website we will call bestgreenwidgets.net. The .com was gone and too expensive and I was ranking number one in google for the search term "best green widgets," and wanted to take advantage of that ranking to rank another site for the same term. Within 2 days of setting up the site, it was number 5 for that search term and has since been bouncing in and out of the results, staying a little longer each time - these are the dates and results.

I set the site up in the beginning of November this year, added a link from the number one page and began building links immediately. A lot of people tell you not to do that. Personal experience tells me this is BS - you will go through the google dance - which will last an unspecified length of time - whether you wait or start immediately.

As you can see, it stayed longer the last time and - as I am still building links aggressively I expect it to eventual settle down at around the 5th result and I can then get more aggressive to push it up to number 2-4. I also have a page with a link on it to my page in the first ten results.

You might ask the question, "why would you want another page in the first ten results if you are already number one?"

Simple - people usually, unless they are extremely unhappy with the result they first click through to - go to only one search result and they tend to go mostly to the first 4. There is a massive difference in traffic between number 6 and number 4. 50% less traffic approximately - although this does vary from subject to subject and the quality of the competing pages.

So - I am no longer interested in having one result on the first page of google. I want all 10 of them if possible. For this term "best green widgets" I currently own 1,2,8 and 5 intermittently. When 5 is solid and no longer "doing the dance," I will start working on more.

But - at the same time I set up 2 other sites under similar situations. i.e. - I owned the first ranked term in google and immediately added a link from that page to the new site. One of them immediately went to number 8 and stayed there. The other one has been totally sandboxed and is still invisible for any search term. You tell me.......