Nothing makes SEO professionals and webmasters cringe faster than the phrase “Google launches new algorithm changes.” These individuals spend the majority of their time creating content and designing websites that will attract the most attention by search engine algorithms, hopefully landing them higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Landing at the top, or at the very least on the first results page, is the name of the game in SEO. If your website isn’t visible, it isn’t getting views and the value of any content contained within dwindles. So when Google announced late last week that it had released its biggest algorithm change in almost 12 years, dubbed Google Hummingbird, the SEO community held its breath yet again.
SEOs and webmasters have faced numerous challenges in recent years as Google’s Panda and Penguin updates to search engine technology have gone live. Further updates and upgrades to these programs have left some websites out in the cold and forced a change in strategy from SEOs. The question now becomes, what impact will Google Hummingbird have on SEO strategies?
Hummingbird Details
As is typical of a change from Google, there are few in-depth details available regarding Hummingbird. However, that doesn’t mean no details are known at this time. It has been noted on TechCrunch that the changes with Hummingbird are less about SEO and more about how queries are processed by Google’s algorithms.
In the past, when a user entered a search query on Google the algorithms would process each individual word in a query in order to find the best results possible for the term or phrase. Hummingbird will now allow the Google engine to consider all the words in a phrase or question as a complex grouping and provide the best results based upon the entire grouping of words.
The greatest impact will be on questions entered into the search engine. Hummingbird is better equipped to consider the entire question as a complex phrase and find the best results in its results index.
Hummingbird and SEO
Despite the now ingrained reaction of all SEOs to any Google updates, webmasters can rest assured that Hummingbird isn’t expected to have a huge impact on SEO strategies. For starters, Google announced Hummingbird last week, but the new algorithm has actually been in place for at least a month. This means that if it was going to impact any webpage standings in SERPs, it would have been noticed by now.
Google announced that the algorithm change effects around 90% of searches, but officials at the company were quick to emphasize that SEO tactics shouldn’t really need to change. That is, of course, assuming that most SEOs have adjusted to the Penguin and Panda updates of the past few years.
As long as SEOs and webmasters continue to focus on unique, high-quality content on their pages along with reliable, relevant backlinks from dependable sources then there won’t be a negative impact from Hummingbird. In fact, it’s been pointed out that those using these tactics will likely experience a boost from Hummingbird as it will process results faster and more accurately, as well as better identifying the value that your content provides to more targeted search queries.