Google’s latest algorithm update is called “Hummingbird.” They sure have a fixation for animals, don’t they? The latest algorithm is aimed at understanding the context of a search on Google as a whole. This is a big change from Google trying to render results on just the search terms at face value. Still lost?
Hummingbird is basically trying to become more artificially.
A few weeks ago, if you were to search on Google for “Company XYZ nutrition” you would most likely get all things related to that company.
- locations
- company history
- pictures
- specials
However, what you probably wouldn’t get, at least on the first page, is the actual nutritional information for that company. But, that’s exactly what you want. Hummingbird is here to fix that. This algorithm tries not to give you a result based on just keywords, but what the keywords mean in the context that you provided.
Google Hummingbird and SEO
While for some this update may be insignificant, as always, there’s a lot more to it deep down. If Google can harness the meaning of text than it can harness the power of a largely untapped ranking signal, social media. Yes, search engines count likes and a few other social metrics. Let’s be honest though. Google’s algorithms cannot currently comprehend the complexities of a sentence or conversation. Once it can, as Hummingbird is starting to work on, than it can understand all of the social chatter. Who is talking about what websites? What are they saying about it? Did they buy from a website? Do they hate a particular brand. If Google could understand all of that information and render the data’s meaning in their search results than it will completely change the search engine world. It would also cut out a large part of blackhat SEO (good!), since social media would be much harder to manipulate.