Introducing Google Hummingbird: The Latest Google Algorithm Update

|

This is probably one of the most shocking news for all online marketers and SEO expert out there: Google has announced a new search algorithm. For those who unfamiliar with this term, algorithm is a system which Google uses to sort through all the information it has when you search and come back with answers. The algorithm is called “Hummingbird” and Google said it should return better results. They explained that the name “Hummingbird” come from being “precise and fast.”

Hummingbird also included PageRank as one of its 200+ major “ingredients”. It looks at PageRank — how important links to a page are deemed to be — along with other factors like the quality of a page, the words used to it and many other things. Google started using this algorithm about a month ago. They only announced the change today.

What does this update mean?

When Google switched to Hummingbird, it’s as if it dropped the old engine out of a car and put in a new one. It also did this so quickly that no one really noticed the switch.

Google struggled to recall when any type of major change like this last happened. In 2010, the “Caffeine Update” was a huge change. But that was also a change mostly meant to help Google better gather information (indexing) rather than sorting through the information. Panda, Penguin and other updates were changes to parts of the old algorithm, but not an entire replacement of the whole. Think of it like a car engine. Those things were as if the engine received a new oil filter or had an improved pump put in. Similar to its predecessors, Hummingbird is a brand new engine, though it continues to use some of the same parts of the old.

In general, Hummingbird is a new engine built on both existing and new parts, organized in a way to especially serve the search demands of today, rather than one created for the needs of ten years ago, with the technologies back then.

The type of “new” search activity does Hummingbird help

“Conversational search” is one of the biggest examples Google gave. People, when speaking searches, may find it more useful to have a conversation. Here’s an example: By typing “What’s the closest place to buy the iPhone 5s to my home?”, a traditional search engine might focus on finding matches for words — finding a page that says “buy” and “iPhone 5s,”.

Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. 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 the electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.

In particular, 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.

Google said that 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.

Does this mean SEO is dead?

No, SEO is not yet dead “again”. In fact, Google’s saying there’s nothing new or different SEOs or publishers need to worry about. The guidance remains the same, it says: have original, high-quality content. Signals that have been important in the past remain important; Hummingbird just allows Google to process them in new and hopefully better ways.

If you haven’t lost traffic in the past month, well, you came through Hummingbird unscathed. After all, it went live about a month ago. If you were going to have problems with it, you would have known by now.

However, if you are losing traffic, perhaps it was due to Hummingbird. Yet, Google stressed that it could also be due to some of the other parts of its algorithm, which are always being changed, tweaked or improved.