Google Partner Webolutions Insights to Google Hummingbird Update
Well, here comes another animal from Google. I thought for sure they were going to stick with their black & white animal theme, but I stand corrected. They have just announced a new algorithm update called “Hummingbird” and they say it’s the biggest search algorithm update in the last 12 years. As online marketing experts, if you haven’t heard about this update, then you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks. Such a cute little birdie….
So let’s answer some of the simple questions first:
- What the heck is an algorithm? An algorithm is the type of technology search engines use to filter through all the websites they have crawled and then determine what results should be listed based on a person’s search query. Simple, right?!?
- What is “Hummingbird” and when was it released? The name of the new algorithm Google has created to deliver what they say will be better results. Google officially announced Hummingbird September 26th, but it’s been live for a few months now. Surprise!
- How does Hummingbird work? Google wants to be better about trying to understand visitor’s intent and the meaning behind the words they are typing in. Hummingbird is supposed to pay attention to all the words in the search query versus just certain words. For example, if you type in “closest store that sells Samsung Galaxy 4 phones”, it will pull in several factors. If you have shared your location with Google, there is a good chance your results will serve you up results for only stores that sell that specific type of phone and the ones that are closest to you.
- Don’t I already get search results like that? You probably did see results like this before, but that may have been mostly on your mobile device. Google has now pushed this update out to billions of web pages across the web, so they are stating this is affecting 90% of search results worldwide.
- How is this going to affect my website SEO? It won’t…as long as you are generating content that helps answer visitor’s queries. Content is still the most important factor of any good SEO strategy. If you aren’t producing quality content that people want to share through social media and links, you are going to get lost online.
How to use this Information
Google’s goal from the beginning has always been the same – focusing on the best user experience possible. They can’t make it any clearer – they want fresh, high-quality content to share with the world. Get creative and keep writing content.
