Alas, Google won’t let any SEO writer live in peace. How many of us were rejoicing on having our sites up in the top 20? Top 30? Now how many of us have had electrocution be given to us after looking at the updates in the last ten hours. Obviously the success crafted via SEO is not a permanent one for any Tech Oriented company but then again this change changes quite a lot of things.
Google has made no secret of its disdain for spam or privacy security with a ridiculous amount of web semantic checks as well as compositional checks. Ultimately the question with SEO was always going to be tentative on what else can Google come up with to further impose checks on what SEO developers do? For most of them, it was a scary possibility to consider because many SEO developers beautifully forego the concept of hiring a proficient or even a competent content writer. The early days of search engine optimization were still in baby and relatively easy steps because anyone who could get the basics of analytics down could get the top ranks assured for their website.
Now the story is painfully different. And there will be analysis on that in detail because the algorithm or the change itself is not the biggest issue, it is how it will affect and pulverize the lazier SEO workers. Because this is just one way in which Google is telling IT professionals to have more skills than just your technical ones, or rather to grow a technical skill set in more areas. It’s a daunting message but it flies well because algorithm changes do not mean paradigm shifts in one go. They certainly do not imply that here, Hummingbird in all likelihood is not that massive a change it just has a lot of signatory strings attached with it which gives off the impressions like a signal flare.
What is the Hummingbird? Google has scrapped Panda to replace it with lightning quick bird. Does that symbolize something? Quicker searching folks. And like a Hummingbird indeed, Google now intends to make its composition search a lot more precise by going for better semantic search. Basically now with each word query and then page results that spring up initially in the matches, Google does semantic tests against the entire page content with more tracking algorithms and offsets. Think of it like Google proofreading your entire article written on a page thrice or four times instead of merely just reading it once. Obviously with that number, Google has a much better chance of capturing semantic impressions and hence rank the articles better content wise. And if you believe the tech-pundits being impressed by the change then obviously your SEO skills are in for a overhaul, that’s the long and short of it. Most of the pundits are already calling this as the more “humanized approach “ to what Google has already been doing. That of course refers to getting the meaning behind the text and trying to get the composition down with the actual query put in to Google.
Hence comes in the question of query optimization. Here the end user asks, is it really that what Google has done here? Conversely the end user still was getting their results off Google when they typed their query in the search box, so what is Hummingbird offering? Again it just means that the composition now most relating to the meaning behind your search will be better picked up.
Of course, that opens up just as many complications as it seems to answer. So will the search bar pick up semantics if one just types in “applications” in the search bar, and if so in what order will the search precedence take place? One would imagine the most popular site featuring “applications” to turn up but that’s not the best meaning catch is there? So in turn this might again mean that Google is warning the “finder” to be more intelligible in his querying. Whether for better or for worse is something that will be decided within the next few months.
On the backend then this implies that Google has significantly improved its database storage because a semantic learning of this proportion means a storage of almost triple the size of what Google already had (which is a very significant amount indeed). On a cost benefit analysis it seems a bit unprecedented at best for Google to have that kind of funding ready for such an expansion but then again, the SEO experts are saying that this is the first significant meaning driven algorithm that Google has really pushed on to the search engines.
So the ultimate question: what do the SEO developers do from here? Well frankly put, this just means that the content has to be more meaning driven, which means that content writers can rest easy enough. No more clogging up an article with an overflow of words to get your keywords done in. The composition, the meaning and the entire content matters. The strategists who have been working on SEO with a clever adaptation on meaning can now just carry on, for the others it means they have to find competent content writers very soon, or risk going even below in the search rankings.
In a nutshell, meaning matters a lot. Get your game on folks, Goggle has gone a bit more human.
