When Google releases news that they have made changes within how they rank content on their search engine it effects the way SEO professionals and site owners do business… Of recent this has been a frequent situation and these ‘changes of the goal posts‘ can be a real headache for many.
The recent HummingBird change though really does, from a social media and content marketer point of view, bring exciting news for the industry. As with any algorithm change that Google make many people who have worked hard to gain a strong position on the search engine will be wondering, how does this affect me and my current ranking?
So Google may have taken away the importance of keywords, but in replacement in offers #HashTag searches, particularly those used in Google+, which are now providing value added results in Google search.
Back to the HummingBird which is here to change the way in which Google calculates it’s queries made on the search engine. So instead of offering search results based around the search query word-by-word, Google now offers results by studying a full question as a search term (e.g. “How much is my house worth in North London?”) which becomes the actual full question.
With the pre-Hummingbird algorithm, the above example question would’ve been more likely to bring back results such as where to buy property, where to get your house valued, where to find estate agents in North London, etc. This is because the old Google would’ve identified the key keywords within the search query and searched based off that. Things now point to the entire question and Google will try and trace results that actually offer a proper answer to that question. So SEO / Bloggers etc should be thinking more towards:
How much are homes worth in North London compared to Property for sale in North London.
So to start gaining results from Google from it’s recent changes you need to start thinking about asking Google questions!