Meet Hummingbird

How Google’s Algorithms Work Today

Narrator: OK, so last time we talked about the basics of SEO and how SEO used to operate before Google evolved and adapted. What we found was that Google had to introduce more stringent methods and more advanced algorithms to prevent people from gaming the system, and that’s why we now have an algorithm that we called Hummingbird. So in this video we’re going to go over what Hummingbird means for you as an SEO or business owner and how you can perform SEO correctly today in order to compensate for some of these changes. OK, so the first thing Google wants to the deal with was all that low-quality content and to do this they introduced an algorithm upgrade called Panda. When we say algorithm, we, of course, mean the mathematical system that Google would use in order to decide which sites in its index would get to the top of which SERP. So when Panda was rolled out, its aim was to make sure that Google was a little more discriminatory between different types of content to make sure that it would favor high quality content over just thin or lights or stolen or keyword stuff’s content. So now content was being penalized if it used a keyword too much to the point that it was distracting for the reader. It’d be penalized if it was too short, or didn’t include enough links, or if it seemed light on facts. So now, the aim was to create quality content, no longer quantity of content. Of course, Google can only identify this to an extent, but on the whole lot of low quality sites, especially those that used pigeon English, poor spelling, spun content, which we discussed last time, they would be penalized and completely removed from the SERPs or at least punished and pushed all the way back in search results. So it just immediately cleaned up the SERPs. But of course, there is also a big backlash in the SEO community and for many online businesses because you have to understand that many company’s livelihoods depend on Google. So if you own a business and say it’s an online e-commerce store and you get all of your customers from people who are searching on Google for buy hats online, suddenly, you’re not number 1 for that was all anymore. You’re number 10, you’re number 30, and all the things you were once doing the Google seems to encourage and now being punished. This would immediately cause many businesses to fold because they lost so much traffic, so much footfall and revenue turnover in that short amount of time, overnight, as soon as google rolled out that change.

So this is why SEO is so important. This is why you need to be up to date with these changes and this is why you mustn’t try and game the system. And this is also why it’s so important not to use a low-quality SEO company because many of the companies out that are still relying on these old-fashioned techniques or these spammy techniques. And that’s because they want to help you see a quick result so you can see that they’re doing something and then they make a quick run of the money and then you get penalized because your site is basically full of spam. So you need to be very careful who you choose, you need speak to the SEO company if you’re going to go that route, make sure that they prioritize quality these days.

And came Penguin and the purpose of Penguin was to act similarly, but this time to punish sites that built spam like links or that we’re trying to game the system with their links, so that meant that sites that had thousands of links pointing at them all from the same website or all from low-quality domains, sites that had been penalized already. This would be seen as a big red flag and Google will punish those sites too. Because of course, that meant you’d probably bought the links or you probably swap to the links or just gone through any kind of malicious strategy to try and get as many links as possible. Instead, Google wants to see links on high quality sites that were relevant to the content of yours and that looked natural. So using your keywords in the anchor text over and over again was also something was now frowned upon because that doesn’t look natural. This is what we call backlinks profile, by the way, all the links pointing to your site, that’s your backlink profile. Google now offers a links disavow tool and you can use that to remove links that you don’t want to associate with your site anymore or that perhaps you didn’t ask for. So if you have a link pointing at you from a spammy site, there is something can do about it. Use that links disavow tool and remove it. Pirate further try to clamp down on sites that are using pirated content, stolen copyright content, spun content, then you have things like Possum and Pigeon and these focus on local SEO so that local businesses are more like it’s come up in the results of local searches.

Another big important one was Mobile. Mobile was an update that of course, emphasized the qualitative experience on a mobile device. So of course, more people these days use mobiles to browse the web. Google wants to ensure that they were getting experiences that were well catered to that mobile form factor, so that means your site needs to adapt to the shape and size of the mobile display that’s viewing it. And there’s RankBrain and RankBrain is kind of similar to Panda in their effects on the quality of content and mentioned word, but this time, is looking more natural language and trying to ensure that searches—they’re longer just look for keyword matches in the text, they actually understand the question and then look for content that answers that question. This might seem like they’re somewhat abstract distinction, but think of it this way, if you search for where’s the best place to buy hats online, Google doesn’t want to find a website that has the exact text where’s the best place to find hacks online, it wants to find the best place to find hats online so it needs to understand what’s in the question and so it’s no longer looking for exact keyword matches and that means that to an extent, the power and importance of exact keywords has been diminished. Which is not to say that they’re not still important, we’ll talk about that a bit more on the next video, but it just means that they don’t rely on matching exact phrases.

And all these different components now combined into a single algorithm that Google refers to as Hummingbird. And the term Hummingbird has a reference to the fact that Google is now much more dynamic and quick to respond to changes. To back in the day, if you make changes to your website, you’d have to wait a month or two months in order to see those changes reflected in your search ranking position. However, now with Hummingbird, Google can respond on the fly. So if you make a change, Google respond to that change and you might see a ranking go up or down overnight. So this makes SEO even more important because any little change you make can be reflected instantly. And over the next few videos we’re going to talk about how to write, how to build links, how to design your website around these changes in order to ensure that any change to your site is a positive one.