What's going on?

[Bernard]

It appears that Google is showing the old SERP results right now. It's returning the old # of backlinks for my site (before this last dance).

I could not access google-dance.com to check what's happening on the different data centers. Anyone else seeing this?

[polarmate]

www-ex and www-sj have different results for my keywords. The rest of the servers all show the same SERPs. I have noticed that all servers do not necessarily have the same results at all times. However, the state of flux is not as much as when the dance is going on nor can I detect a pattern in the changes ie they do not migrate to all servers.

Sometimes I have seen very old indexes appear - I saw my affiliate URL last week on www-sj which Google had awarded us in Jan.

It's definitely not the update (Google Dance). According to GoogleGuy over WMW, it's way too early for that. He said 'Ugh!' when someone suggested 'update.'

With freshbot, Google's indexes are updated more regularly than before which might be part of the reason why the indexes are not identical at all times. Google probably also test their changes on certain servers from time to time and it is also possible that they revert to an old index for this purpose. Imagine my excitement when one of my sites which is at #13 suddenly appeared in the top #10. Only I saw it and only from one particular computer and it lasted for precisely 5 minutes.

Who knows what they are up to. Beyond a point it is futile to follow these things and attempt to make sense of it as it essentially remains outside of our sphere of control. Having said that, I can tell you that I do get excited and wonder whether my sites will make it into the top 10 based on the brief results I saw. ;)

[Bernard]

It appears that the main datacenter has restored the expected results just now.

I didn't think it was the dance, but I thought that Google didn't change the results of the main data center like that. I'm glad its back to the post April dance results. :up:

[polarmate]

They needn't necessarily change the index of the main datacenter - they can just point the IP of the main datacenter to another of the servers or even a test server.