Seen a Bury St Edmunds Dentist Dance?

We recently created a new site for a client on a new domain, called Dentist Bury St Edmunds. The performance of the site in the SERPs (search engine results pages) reminded us of an enduring mystery...

One of the bigger puzzles in search engine optimisation is a phenomenon known as the 'Google dance'.

Sometimes a website will be indexed quite quickly by Google and might even appear on the first few pages, especially if it's been set up with SEO in mind.

With on-page SEO and some nice incoming links, a site can quickly be successful. But sometimes it will then simply disappear. The site is still there if you type in the URL, but it doesn't come up in the search results.

Then, just as suddenly, the website will reappear in the listings. It might be a few days or it may take longer, but when the site does come back it will often be in a higher position than previously.

This is what SEO experts call the Google dance, and it's what happened to our dentist site.

It looks like the most important thing, when a site disappears, is to continue link building, bookmarking and so on, as though everything was fine. This may be why, once Google decides to index the site again, it often appears higher in the SERPs (because it now has more links than it did before). It's also important to give the site the authority that steady link-building bestows on a website, because authority is a big thing with Google.

So the lesson is, if your new site disappears from site, don't panic. Carry on as if nothing was wrong, and chances are that very soon your website will be doing even better than it was before.

Here's the website we're talking about, for Dentist in Bury St Edmunds.

Roy