Google has softly retooled the closely guarded formula running its internet search engine to give better answers to the more and more complex questions posed by web surfers.
The overhaul came as part of an update called "Hummingbird" that Google has slowly rolled out in the past month without disclosing the modifications.
What’s a “search algorithm?”
That’s a technological term for what you can think of as a formula that Google uses to sort through the billions of web pages and other information it has, in order to return what it believes are the best answers.
What’s “Hummingbird?”
It’s the name of the new search algorithm that Google is using; one that Google says should come back better results.
So that “PageRank” algorithm is dead?
No. PageRank is one of over 200 major “ingredients” that go into the Hummingbird formula. Hummingbird looks at PageRank — how significant links to a page are deemed to be — along with other factors like whether Google believes a page is of good quality, the words used on it and many other things
What does it indicate that Hummingbird is now being used?
Think of a car build in the 1950s. It might have a great engine, but it might also be an engine that lacks things like fuel injection or be unable to use unleaded fuel. When Google switched to Hummingbird, it’s as if it dropped the older engine out of a car and put in a new one. It also did this so rapidly that no one really noticed the switch.
When’s the last time Google replaced its algorithm this way?
Google struggled to recall when any type of major modify like this last happened. In 2010, the “Caffeine Update” was a huge change. But that was also a change mostly destined to help Google improved gather information (indexing) rather than sorting through the information.
What about all these Penguin, Panda and other “updates” — haven’t those been changes to the algorithm?
Panda, Penguin and other updates were changes to parts of the old algorithm, but not an whole replacement of the whole. Think of it again like an engine. Those things were as if the engine received a fresh oil filter or had an improved pump put in. Hummingbird is a brand new engine, though it continues to use some of the same parts of the old, like Penguin and Panda
What type of “new” search action does Hummingbird help?
“Conversational search” is one of the major examples Google gave. People, when speaking searches, may find it more useful to have a conversation..
Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the language. It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might recognize that “place” means you want a brick-and-mortar store
In particular, Google said that Hummingbird is paying more notice to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole
Does it really work? Any before-and-afters?
We don’t know. There’s no way to do a “before-and-after” ourselves, now. Attractive much, we only have Google’s word that Hummingbird is improving things. However, Google did present some before-and-after examples of its own; that it says shows Hummingbird improvements.
Does this mean SEO is dead?
No, SEO is not yet again dead. In fact, Google’s saying there’s nothing new or different SEOs or publishers need to worry about. Guidance remains the same, it says: have original, high-quality content. Signals that have been significant in the past remain important; Hummingbird just allows Google to practice them in new and hopefully better ways.
Does this denote I’m going to lose traffic from Google?
If you haven’t 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 evils with it, you would have known by now.
By and large, there’s been no major disagreement among publishers that they’ve lost rankings. This seems to support Google saying this is very much a query-by-query effect, one that may pick up particular searches — particularly complex ones — rather than something that hits “head” terms that can, in turn, cause major traffic shifts.
But I did lose traffic!
Maybe it was due to Hummingbird, but Google stressed that it could also be due to some of the other parts of its algorithm, which are always being changed, tweaked or enhanced. There’s no way to know.
I hope to do a extra formal look at the changes from those conversations in the near future. But for now, hopefully you’ve found this fast FAQ based on those conversations to be helpful.
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