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Hummingbird – what you need to know to rank your website

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Google announced a new change to its algorithm last week that has delighted and confused in equal measure. Dubbed “Hummingbird” it’s been in use for over a month now and it apparently affects 90% of search, which is massive. So why the silence?

The latest Penguin update affected only a few % of search and it was as if the world was in meltdown. For weeks people complained their very livelihood was being ripped away by Google’s ever changing ideas as to what makes a good website and what makes you a spammy spammer from spam town. So this 90% should have had people reaching for the Valium; but no, nobody even noticed – so what gives?

Well this is indeed a huge update but it affects something that a lot of SEOs have been missing for years and to be honest, a lot of businesses have completely missed and still don’t see as important and that’s ‘natural language search’. This is particularly interesting for me because it’s exactly where I started years ago – the company I joined back in the early noughties was creating software that didn’t search on keywords but instead tried to relate a natural language query to a large document.

Hang on a minute – large document? That thing I wrote about a month or so back? Could these two be related?

Let’s talk about Hummingbird first.

This change is for ‘conversational search’ so the idea is that you can search for “where’s the best place to buy timber in in Dudley” rather than “Timber merchant Dudley” and you’ll get good results. Thing is, people surely aren’t typing this in are they? Certainly when I was working on the technology way back then we found that people just wanted to type a few words in and get answers, typing full questions was cumbersome and slow. However mobile phones have changed the way we do things now and it’s possible to speak to your phone and if you’re speaking, it’s more natural to ask a question. I guess this first came about with Apple’s Siri, although it’s had some mixed results.

You can actually do this from the desktop, just click on that little microphone doohicky on the search box, bark a question at your computer and voilà, it will go away and do a search for you.

Looks odd in a crowded office though.

So Google wants to be more than just a keyword search and this is a good thing, surely? I personally think it is. While most people may well be conditioned into using a couple of keywords to search, there will be many who will find that natural language is an easier way to find what they want. I certainly do, I discovered quite early on that typing in a full question will get me the answer I want and if it doesn’t, I get more ideas for using the correct keywords on any subsequent searches.

A real example

Let’s see how this works in the wild then.

For reasons best left undiscovered, imagine you are interested in buying a shisha pipe. So, you could search for “shisha pipe” and you’d get the following:

Searching for "Shisha Pipe"

Searching for “Shisha Pipe”

 

As you can see, we get a mixture of results. The first is a link to ebay, the second is a link off to the Daily Fail and the third and fourth are links to an actual shop selling them.

Great stuff, now let’s search for “What is a Shisha Pipe?”

What is a shisha pipe?

What is a shisha pipe?

Very different results.

OK, let’s go further. How about “How does a shisha pipe work?”

 

How does a shisha pipe work?

How does a shisha pipe work?

Again, completely different. Wow. So no longer are we just looking at keywords, we’re now looking at intent. In fact, to find our favourite Shisha Shop we need to now ask “where can I buy a shisha pipe” and blam – number one.

How does it do it?

I’ll explain how my last company did it in the hope that it relates to how Google does it (‘cos let’s face it, nobody really knows how or why they do most things). What we used to do was filter certain words out of the string that we classed as “stop words” and “filler” that had no conversational value like “the”, “that” etc. We essentially distilled the words down so that fluff (of which there’s plenty in the English language) was stripped out but the meaning was still clear.

Then we went through a process of “stemming” or finding the original root of a word. So the root of “worked” is “work”. This gets added to the search query.

Then we did a keyword search of sorts on the database of documents, putting out the documents that had the most frequency but modifying it by all the words in the string and using some secret sauce based on learning and neural networks. Won’t explain that bit, too complex and I’ve forgotten.

Put simply, the keywords and the intent are now used as part of the search.

Intent and keywords in harmony

Intent and keywords in harmony

What we found was that documents that were longer and had more in-depth information tended to bubble to the top more often because there was more knowledge to go on.

Hang on a minute!!

You’re ahead of me. Google has already announced the “large document” change which I’ve spoken about previously, so it appears here may be an opportunity to optimise our content to make the most of these two changes.

How can these changes help my site?

Well Google has said for ages that we should all be creating more and better content. The typical routine for SEO has been to squirt out gazillions of 400 word badly written articles in the hope it will affect the rankings and for a long time it worked well, however now Google wants more. It seems that these two changes are a nudge in that direction. More documents with more content answering more questions and that nod towards a more natural search.

“Hummingbird” and the “In-Depth Article” change are changes for the good. They work towards a more helpful web and as content creators (that’s what you are, now by the way) you need to be creating more stuff and helping more people with all that lovely information you have. Do that and you will (probably) be rewarded.

Until Google changes its mind again.

Here’s a summary for you infographic lovers out there

Google Hummingbird Distilled

Google Hummingbird Distilled

The post Hummingbird – what you need to know to rank your website appeared first on Calloway Green.


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