What Will the Hummingbird Update Do to Our SEO Efforts?

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It was in the last week of September, Google stunned the SEO world with its surprise package – Hummingbird.

Hummingbird is the new search algorithm that Google is using to give us better results for our queries in the search engine. There have been upgrades like Panda and Penguin, but Hummingbird is not simply an upgrade. This is the biggest change in the algorithm since 2010. It is practically replacement of the Google’s Caffeine Update made in 2010 and combines all other updates for it’s functionality.  It is like replacing an old engine with a new one but having some old parts.

Hummingbirds are known for their tiny size and rapid flapping of their wings. That’s the reason Google named their new algorithm after it as it signifies “precise and fast”.

Though officially announcement was made on Sep 26, 2013, but the change of algorithm has been started a month ago. Difference between Caffeine and Hummingbird is that Caffeine focused on indexing and crawling of sites while Hummingbird’s main feature is the Conversational Search which depends heavily on Google’s Knowledge Graph as well as from other web pages.

Hummingbird would pay attention to each of the word in a query and would take the meaning of the entire sentence into account rather than showing pages having one or two words.

For around a year, Google has been working on a model that can co-relate “real world entities and their relationship to one another: things, not strings.” Knowledge Graph has more than 500 million objects and more than 3.5 billion facts about the relationship between these objects. Now, it is not just Knowledge Graph but Hummingbird would gather meaning from millions of other pages. For example, if you type “place for buying pizza”, the new algorithm might understand that by place you meant restaurant and will give result of restaurants selling pizza.

Question that everyone asking – What Will the Hummingbird Update Do to Our SEO Efforts?

Google assures that there is nothing to worry. If you have been using high quality content, original design and relevant, good quality sites linking to your website, then it will not lose page rank or traffic. Hummingbird can even better your position in the page rank if you have better quality content than your competitors.

Keyword stuffing cannot help to get you page rank. Focus should be made on content. Remember the following:

• Quality is more important than quantity. Content should be original, relevant, and of high quality.
• Decrease the loading time of your website page by removing unnecessary photos or tags.
• Update your content regularly with the main keywords being used at least two or three times. But do not replace your existing content if it is of good quality and fetched you rank.
• Use long-tailed keywords for better results.
• Tie your website and related blog to Google+ and take control of your Google authorship.
• To put your website on the Hummingbird map, you can put links to Google owned sites like Youtube in your website.

Those who have been spamming their sites with keywords, irrelevant backlinks are already being penalized after the Panda, Penguin updates and same thing will happen after arrival of Hummingbird too.

However, one bad news is the presence of Information Card by Google which sometimes provide the data you are looking for in the search result page. For example, if you type “meaning of organization” the information card will show you the meaning on the search result page and no one will click on the websites.

Nevertheless, try to be more informative in your website so that people come to your page for exhaustive data. Be original, informative, place quality over quantity and Hummingbird is there to put your site in appropriate position.

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