First of all, nervous Portland SEOs and business owners: Hummingbird is not a new algorithm update like Panda or Penguin, it’s a new algorithm. The good news for SEO in Portland and for webmasters and internet and digital marketers who fear being struck down by any major changes that Google makes to its algorithm is that it is OLD NEWS. Yep, that’s right, Hummingbird quietly launched a few months ago, according to Google. So, if you weren’t hit by it, you probably don’t need to worry much about it. Don’t just trust us, check out this article from Forbes.
Google announced the algorithm update at a press event last week. The press corp learned that Hummingbird was described as the biggest Google algorithm change since Caffeine, and that it is designed to let Google quickly parse entire questions and complex queries and return relevant answers, as opposed to looking at queries on a keyword-by-keyword basis.
Hummingbird is designed to help Google understand your webpages the way it understands the data in its Knowledge Graph. Google calls the algorithm “Hummingbird” because it’s “precise and fast”. It hasn’t been since 2001 that the algorithm was “so dramatically rewritten” (Sullivan’s words).
Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. And it may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that ‘place’ means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that ‘iPhone 5s’ is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.
Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words.
The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words. Hummingbird is designed to apply the meaning technology to billions of pages from across the web, in addition to Knowledge Graph facts, which may bring back better results.
So, Hummingbird is really just an extension of Google’s ongoing strategy to become less dependent on keywords, which does have implications for SEO, and while webmasters may not have to worry about a major drop-off in rankings like with updates like Panda or Penguin, this could be more of an ongoing struggle for those competing to get on search results pages.
Keywords are becoming less and less important to search engine ranking success as Google gets smarter at figuring out what things mean, both on the query side of things and on the webpage side of things. The algorithm still consists of over 200 different signals that webmasters can potentially take advantage of to gain a competitive edge.
It’s probably going to be more important than ever to give Google as much information about your site as possible, so that it “understands” it. I would imagine that Google will continue to give webmasters new tools to help with this over time. For now, according to Google (per Sullivan’s report), you don’t need to worry about anything, and Google’s normal SEO guidance remains the same for Portland, Oregon Digital and Internet Marketing and SEO companies.
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