Hummingbird in a Nutshell

How did Hummingbird change SEO?

When hummingbird was introduced quietly by Google, that is to say, without anybody actually noticing it, webmasters feared that it will impact their rankings negatively. Now, how they arrived at that conclusion is secondary, but if you were a part of the crowd that panicked at the adaptation of the said algorithm, then you should know that your page rankings will have nothing to do with the algorithm as such. What hummingbird actually did is to make the search engines more equipped to handle conversational queries. Now if you ask Google, "where can I find a pet store?" it is more likely to come up with the right answer in seconds. This in no way can be said to affect the visibility of your pages, or negatively impact those hard earned rankings that you enjoy.

Links affect your rankings

All said and done, it is very likely that, your links still affect your SERP ranking. This is to answer all those who believed that hummingbird destroyed all that they had set up. There have been no instances of web pages losing out on their rankings on the search engines after Google made its conversational searches better. Instead, if there were any alterations in the ranking, it still had to be connected to spammy and irrelevant linking in within the sites.

The importance of conversational searches

If you have not already noticed the trend, which is very unlikely, but anyway, let me tell you that more than half your audience this year will be mobile users. With their smartphones accompanying them everywhere they go, and with speech recognition coming to be the new favourite feature in the phones, your users will be likely to ask the search engine to search for a specific place or a product like they are talking to a friend. This means that Google needs to be equipped to manage these questions that are being spoken to it efficiently. Hummingbird was formulated to cater to this changing trend of the smartphone users.

What is the difference between caffeine and hummingbird?

If you are still confuse, then caffeine was a change in the structure of the algorithm, but hummingbird is an addition to the existing algorithm. What caffeine did was refine the searches to present relevant content to the users and reduce the visibility of spammy sites with irrelevant links. On the other hand hummingbird aims at providing search results to the users based on knowledge graphs that are better able to understand the speech queries of the users.

What do you need to do?

If you have been traditionally aiming at achieving high ranking by optimizing your web designs, putting up strong content, having relevant and to the point links, appropriate and trending keywords and a strong social media presence on your website, then there is no reason for you change anything much. All that you need to do is improvise on the existing techniques and you will continue to rise up that ladder.

Author resource

This article was written by Aalbert Lee who has worked in the field of marketing for a long time. He has now turned a writer on the subject of an online marketing company to spread the knowledge to people who seek it from articles. He gives important tips on internet advertising India which is no long old and out dated. Look out for his articles for more information on the online marketing.

Aalbert lee