(Continued)     September 4, 2004 edition

Question: -- Serge, I love your newsletter and the way you write! We have completely rebuilt a site we maintain for a non-profit involved in charity. We have been making adjustements to the site with the hope of improving its rankings and relevancy.

Also, when I perform the exact same keyword search in Yahoo, I get the happy news that we are placed at number one. Do you have any idea why Google outputs completely different results from their main google.com engine and why the results would be as you want them and then totally disappear?

Hello and I'm happy if you appreciate our newsletter. I think I know what is happening here. Last week when you were doing your searches, Google was right in the middle of a minor database update. Not a big Google dance, but still a scheduled update of their search engine. The "dance" is the time of month when Google is updating its entire index of more than four billion pages.

When Google is updating, it creates a lot of instability between its various data centers. This is why sometimes you will see your newly optimized site and at other times your old site will come up with the older Google rankings. However, the good news is that the higher listings you are seeing are actually an indicator of what you can expect once the data centers stabilize. Your 'final' positioning may not be exactly as you saw it during the update, but it should be somewhere close to it.

Please note that Google's search results can fluctuate at any time during the month, not just during its update period. The same is true for the other engines. Hope that helps.

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