Google Hummingbird Update – What Does It Mean?

Google love their creatively named updates, we’ve seen Panda, Penguin and Caffeine to name a few over the years, and in the past few weeks we have begun to see the rolling out of the newest member of the family, Google Hummingbird, but what exactly does this update have in store?

Google say that the update is named Hummingbird as it is “precise and fast” in delivering search results, but deep down it actually makes a rather significant change to the way in which Google, as a search engine, delivers the results you are after. The core focus of the Hummingbird update is to make Google altogether more intelligent, and to give it more of a human way of thought, now, I wouldn’t go worrying about an I-robot style scenario any time soon, but the worlds most popular way of search is certainly getting more clever.

Designed to provide more accurate results for “conversational search” Google will now be much better at providing answers to specific questions, rather than just picking out specific keywords, for example if someone searches “Where’s the closest place I can buy cakes in Mansfield?” it will read the whole query and provide you with a place – a building – in Mansfield, which sells cakes, rather than simply picking out the words “buy” “cakes” and “mansfield” and providing you with results which contains those said keywords.

Now, if you’re sat there saying “but Google already does conversational stuff” then you’re right, but this update has made the whole thing a lot more in depth and intelligent, meaning that the algorithm now understands a lot more words and can relate terms to each other a lot more clearly than any time in the past.

So, what does this all mean for SEO’s like ourselves, and those companies fighting for positions on Google? Well, the official word from the search engine themselves is that as long as you have good content and a useful website, there’s nothing to worry about, this simply means that people can search – or voice search – a straight forward question and get better answers. In SEO terms there are whispers and rumours that this will begin to somewhat phase out anchor text links, however that remains to be seen, and overall, this is just another step by Google to try and get the very best quality websites coming up in their search results, so as always, if you’ve got the quality, you’ve got nothing to worry about!

For more information regarding how Google works, the latest hummingbird update, or to see if your website has the right quality and features to be a search engine success, then please do not hesitate to get in touch with the Dijitul team today on any of the methods below.

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See what others are saying about the Hummingbird update:
BBC
Telegraph
Forbes