It seems like all is quiet in the Googleplex right now, but you never know when the next “Google Dance” is coming. When it does come, a great tool to use to monitor the progress is the McDar Data Center Quick Check tool.

So what the heck is a data center? You can think of a Google data center as a library that stores millions of books - each book represents a cached version of a Web site Google has indexed. In order to service the incredible amount of search queries that Google gets every day, Google has multiple libraries where they store their cached content.

When a major Google update happens, these libraries of cached content are updated along with the algorithm that determines search results. All of the libraries, or data centers, are updated with the new information. But these updates happen at different times - and this is where the Data Center Quick Check tool comes in.

So how does the Data Center Quick Check tool work? All you do is enter your sites URL, a keyword that you think you should be ranking for, and select a datacenter bank. When you hit “submit,” you will be prompted to wait as the tool goes out and spiders the various data centers and brings you back your chosen URLs rankings for the keyword you entered on multiple data centers.

When the Google data centers are operating normally, all of them should come back with fairly similar results (give or take a position or two).

If Google is performing an algorithmic and/or indexing update, the different data centers will usually show very different ranking results from data center to data center. This happens because the different data centers are updated at different times.

Usually, after a few days you can see the data centers grouping together into two or three different groups of results. Some people think this happens as Google tries multiple versions of the algorithm during the updates and possibly uses entirely different versions of the index itself.

As an update comes to an end, you will see the data centers start to come closer together in their results. Once the update is over, the data centers will settle and show similar results.

While there is nothing you can really do to stop a Google update from happening, tools like McDars Data Center Quick Check make the process a little more bearable. It feels good to know when an update is occuring and when it has ended.

Thanks to the Quick Check tool, I no longer spend Google updates hiding under my desk-and my boss appreciates that.

Happy Quick Checking.

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