Search Engines live by these
algorithms and rely on them for successfully delivering relevant content to its
users. Search Engines, typically make frequent updates in order to create a
better search experience, deliver more relevant results, and ultimately keep
their searchers coming back.
Names like Panda and Penguin are
behind the scenes names for code releases, and are most familiar to those who
follow the industry releases.
Google’s latest algorithm change is
called “Hummingbird” and the information below should help you understand the
changes and affects it could potentially have on your advertising.
Hummingbird
Google started using Hummingbird in
late September 2013. No, PageRank is not gone – PageRank is one of over 200 major components
that go into the Hummingbird algorithm. Hummingbird looks at PageRank along
with other factors – like overall page quality, the influence a page has on the
market, and the quality of all crawl-able content on the page – to determine
what to serve up on a search engine results page (SERP).
Panda, Penguin and other
updates were changes made to the old algorithm, but not an entire
replacement of the existing algorithm. Hummingbird is brand new and replaced
the old algorithm; though it does continue to use some of the same pieces of
the old algorithm.
Hummingbird was introduced to produce results in response to an overwhelming use of “conversational” type search terms. These searches are using more than just keywords and phrases in queries; they are searching with long tailed terms and have very specific requests. Before Hummingbird, if someone would search “What’s the closest place to my home to buy an iPad?” a traditional search engine might focus on finding matches for a small number of keywords and find a page that says “buy” and “iPad.” Hummingbird is designed to better focus on the meaning behind the words and could take into account the actual location of your home (if you’ve shared that with Google). It might also understand that “place” means you want a brick-and-mortar store and allow you to filter out results showing virtual or online locations.
Google has said that Hummingbird is
paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the entire search
query is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that
pages matching the overall meaning rank better than pages matching just a few
words.
How does Hummingbird affect you as
an advertiser?
Google’s guidance remains the same,
it says: to help ensure more relevant search results, advertisers must
concentrate on original, high-quality content. According to Google’s Matt
Cutts, if you are focused on high quality
content, you shouldn’t worry too much about changes to algorithms. Jeremy Rigsby, Lead
SEO Strategist at www.TheLocalSearchAgency.com, a search consulting and
strategy firm, describes high quality content as:
1. Location information carrying or offering a particular product or service
2. Detailed product or service descriptions
3. Variations of products or services
4. Offers and promotions for a particular product or services
If you advertise on Google, code releases like Hummingbird call for you to
continually check to make sure your content
strategy hasn’t gone stale and that your website hasn’t lost its
competitiveness. The best rule of thumb is make sure that you have the
necessary high-relevant content that supports your lines of business, and that
it’s easily crawl-able and indexed by Google.
