by samRecently, Google made a huge change to its core search technology and officially announced the release of their new algorithm called Hummingbird. One day before Google’s 15th birthday, Senior Vice President Amit Singhal revealed the new algorithm that had already been in use for the past month. It was a quiet change that is thought to be the biggest algorithm movement since caffeine rolled out in 2010. The creators claimed it’s the culmination of around 15 years work, Singhal said “Our algorithm had to go through some fundamental rethinking of how we are going to keep our results relevant”. In short, development of this technology has taken a very long time, and is a very big deal. Google gave out little details about how Hummingbird actually works but they did answer a few questions that gave relevant answers for us SEO experts.
Google said that this algorithm will allow the search engine to quickly answer full questions, this is a result from more frequent mobile and voice searches. With more and more smart phones on the market they need to keep up with more and more search devices. The search engine will be able to identify and rank answers to questions from the content they have indexed. This algorithm is set to affect 90{06e29518e582b1cc2da09f8f2ea316dadc41c520023bcca83a4deb5e6ad0a3c6} of searches worldwide; it has been designed to handle more complex searches as well as full questions. Although there is a whole new algorithm, Google is still using old parts from the previous algorithm.
So how does this new algorithm affect search engine optimisation? Google says there is nothing that SEO experts or publishers need to worry about, the guidance is the same and Google is still focusing on sites using original high-quality content. Important signals from the past still remain important; Hummingbird just allows Google to process them in new and better ways. Search engine optimisation should not be affected massively if you are using it correctly, this algorithm still relies on keywords but not simply them alone. This is because the search engine is aimed at the real meaning of the query and really understanding the users. This algorithm should hopefully be able to clearly separate the SEO experts from the black hat users, which is great news for us as Google rule abiders. If your site contains relevant content information you shouldn’t have a problem with this new algorithm, however if your site is currently stuffed with keywords you may want to re-consider.
Here are some ways that you can improve your SEO techniques following the new hummingbird update. Firstly you need to be optimising for long tail keywords. This helps with the algorithms way of finding relevant answers to full questions, you can do this by researching what sentences searchers used to find your site and target them. Another tip is to make your website’s theme obvious; using synonyms of your targeted keywords can help with this. As well as using your current keywords that already get users to your site, more often. Helping Google to understand your website better is also a useful way to improve SEO, you can do this by using rich snippets in your HTML code.
Many believe that these updates wont make a massive change for us as SEO’s but overall this algorithm will have a positive effect. Even though it isn’t making massive changes with ranking it does affect the use of keywords and queries in a good way. This is a very intelligent algorithm, dedicated to understanding the user itself and the natural language they use.