The search engine landscape is *constantly* evolving – and the past month has been a big one for major changes. On the heels of last week’s big news that Google will be moving all of its organic search keyword data into the (not available) bucket, Google Senior VP Amit Singhal announced that the search engine giant has been rolling out the “Hummingbird” index update. This story has been picked up even by many mainstream news providers, but what does it all mean?
Google Index Basics
The last time Google made a significant change to its search index was with 2010’s Caffeine, which provided “50 percent fresher results for web searches than (the) last index.” This update confirmed what SEOs had been encouraging clients to pursue for some time – blogging and other “fresh” content initiatives like video, news and real-time updates were going to become critical to getting and keeping organic search rankings.
Hummingbird is similar in that it’s not a small algorithm change – there are plenty of those – but a completely new algorithm – a change to the index itself. Before Caffeine, Google’s index had “several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, Google would analyze the entire web.” This is why it used to take much longer for SEO strategies to take effect – websites just weren’t hit as often.
What Hummingbird Might Mean for Marketers
“Hummingbird is primarily aimed at giving Google’s search engine a better grasp at understanding concepts instead of mere words”, according to Singhal. Google’s been trying to get “beyond words” to understand its users’ intent for a long time. The Knowledge Graph is a recent attempt. Wolfram Alpha also comes to mind.
Hummingbird Knowledge Graph Result
SEO guru Danny Sullivan says “the goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.”
On a practical level, Hummingbird will deliver faster, better results for long tail searches, which Singhal said reflects the fact that searchers now “routinely enter lengthy questions into the search box instead of just a few words related to specific topics”. Siri and other voice recognition programs have also led to more long tail searches.
This could make trying to rank for high volume, short, “core” organic keywords not as huge of a consideration for companies who aren’t already dominant in their space. If Google’s really going to get better at sussing out user intent, and as users become more precise in what they’re searching for, some tried and true SEO tactics really come to mind including (drum roll):
FAQs! People are looking for answers to questions. If you’ve got the answers, publish them on your site. One thing we see all the time, though are reallllly long FAQ pages. We recommend “chunking” these out by topic – and also, aligning your FAQs with themes in your main and secondary navigations would be a great idea for a very rich resource.
What are your thoughts? Please share in the comments.