3 Ways Content Will Be Affected by Google’s Latest Hummingbird update

Google officially announced the latest, and biggest, algorithm update to hit your very favorite search engine since 2010’s Caffeine update. You could call it another search results overhaul but, truthfully, it’s just a small part of an overall evolution to bring better information to consumers for the moments that matter.

Google is making an effort to practice what they preach in a big way. Have you seen their commercials? It’s clear that Google has its sights set on emerging as the ultimate source of information. Want an old school SAT analogy to help you out? Google is to information as Apple is to devices. This new update is a clear indicator that Google is making bold moves to become an increasingly integral part of your life, not only supplying information you want, but intelligence you didn’t even know you needed.

So what does this all mean for marketers? Content producers, listen up; this one’s for you.

Content Needs to Satisfy Intent

About two years ago, we saw a shift in search from “dumb” keyword optimization to a more intent-based channel where search engines endeavored to “best guess” a search user’s intent, matching it to relevant content that (hopefully) best answered a user’s query.

More recently, “context” has entered search strategy lexicon, which accounts for more personalized search tactics based on location, platform, device and/or hyper local factors.

With Google’s Hummingbird algorithm update, launched last month, and officially announced today, Google is further underscoring the importance of user intent over pure keyword based interpretation. This new update now better acknowledges context, timeliness, conversational search location cues, Knowledge Graph data and understanding of complex queries.

Content Needs to Be Rich

So, how do marketers focus their own content to satisfy more complex user intent? Content needs to be deep, and rich, to be deemed the most relevant piece of content for any given query. Sites that are currently developing rich content that seek to answer more comprehensive questions, rather than keywords or phrases, will increase their chances of ranking well with the new update. However, while sites need to rely heavily on rich content, they also need to maintain well-designed sites, which make it easier for Google spiders to find that great content.

Authorship Matters

Because content seems to be the biggest emphasis for this update, it also likely means that authorship will become an even more important factor in optimization. It’s interesting that this update is coming right on the heels of several recent notable changes. The first being the complete integration of secure search, which eliminated keyword data from analytics, and the second being Google+ rolling out a change to authorship, which will make it easier on Google to attribute content back to the author. So, while you start thinking about you content program, and whether or not it supports the new algorithm update, don’t forget to take authority into account. Make sure profiles are created, updated, and attributed for all pieces of content.

What does the future hold?

It’s hard to predict exactly what the future will entail, because Google is predictably unpredictable, but it’s safe to say that this update is a clear move towards a more Semantic Web, which aims at getting a better understanding of “aboutness” – not just from markup of entities, but in the ability to extract sentiment from the structure of a sentence – so there’s probably more coming. Perhaps the answer is in a more “implicit” search.

Even if Hummingbird does fundamentally change search in the long term, its introduction went by relatively un-noticed as little more than a slight improvement in search results. And, though Google notes that the update covers about 90% of search queries worldwide, it will feel incremental from a user perspective. Marketers, however, should be cautious because the update brings a greater implication from both an operational and technical standpoint. Google continues to push towards a world where “Content is King,” and understanding user search intent is the end goal. And, maybe one day they just may be able to answer our questions before we even ask them.


Courtesy to : searchenginejournal

FAQ: All About The New Google “Hummingbird” Algorithm

Google has a new search algorithm, the system it uses to sort through all the information it has when you search and come back with answers. It’s called “Hummingbird” and below, what we know about it so far.

What’s a “search algorithm?”

That’s a technical term for what you can think of as a recipe that Google uses to sort through the billions of web pages and other information it has, in order to return what it believes are the best answers.

What’s “Hummingbird?”

It’s the name of the new search algorithm that Google is using, one that Google says should return better results.

So that “PageRank” algorithm is dead?

No. PageRank is one of over 200 major “ingredients” that go into the Hummingbird recipe. Hummingbird looks at PageRank — how important links to a page are deemed to be — along with other factors like whether Google believes a page is of good quality, the words used on it and many other things (see our Periodic Table Of SEO Success Factors for a better sense of some of these).

Why is it called Hummingbird?

Google told us the name come from being “precise and fast.”

When did Hummingbird start? Today?

Google started using Hummingbird about a month ago, it said. Google only announced the change today.

What does it mean that Hummingbird is now being used?

Think of a car built in the 1950s. It might have a great engine, but it might also be an engine that lacks things like fuel injection or be unable to use unleaded fuel. When Google switched to Hummingbird, it’s as if it dropped the old engine out of a car and put in a new one. It also did this so quickly that no one really noticed the switch.

When’s the last time Google replaced its algorithm this way?

Google struggled to recall when any type of major change like this last happened. In 2010, the “Caffeine Update” was a huge change. But that was also a change mostly meant to help Google better gather information (indexing) rather than sorting through the information. Google search chief Amit Singhal told me that perhaps 2001, when he first joined the company, was the last time the algorithm was so dramatically rewritten.

What about all these Penguin, Panda and other “updates” — haven’t those been changes to the algorithm?

Panda, Penguin and other updates were changes to parts of the old algorithm, but not an entire replacement of the whole. Think of it again like an engine. Those things were as if the engine received a new oil filter or had an improved pump put in. Hummingbird is a brand new engine, though it continues to use some of the same parts of the old, like Penguin and Panda

The new engine is using old parts?

Yes. And no. Some of the parts are perfectly good, so there was no reason to toss them out. Other parts are constantly being replaced. In general, Hummingbird — Google says — is a new engine built on both existing and new parts, organized in a way to especially serve the search demands of today, rather than one created for the needs of ten years ago, with the technologies back then.

What type of “new” search activity does Hummingbird help?

“Conversational search” is one of the biggest examples Google gave. People, when speaking searches, may find it more useful to have a conversation.

“What’s the closest place to buy the iPhone 5s to my home?” A traditional search engine might focus on finding matches for words — finding a page that says “buy” and “iPhone 5s,” for example.

Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that “place” means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that “iPhone 5s” is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.

In particular, Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.

I thought Google did this conversational search stuff already!

It does (see Google’s Impressive “Conversational Search” Goes Live On Chrome), but it had only been doing it really within its Knowledge Graph answers. Hummingbird is designed to apply the meaning technology to billions of pages from across the web, in addition to Knowledge Graph facts, which may bring back better results.

Does it really work? Any before-and-afters?

We don’t know. There’s no way to do a “before-and-after” ourselves, now. Pretty much, we only have Google’s word that Hummingbird is improving things. However, Google did offer some before-and-after examples of its own, that it says shows Hummingbird improvements.

A search for “acid reflux prescription” used to list a lot of drugs (such as this, Google said), which might not be necessarily be the best way to treat the disease. Now, Google says results have information about treatment in general, including whether you even need drugs, such as this as one of the listings.

A search for “pay your bills through citizens bank and trust bank” used to bring up the home page for Citizens Bank but now should return the specific page about paying bills

A search for “pizza hut calories per slice” used to list an answer like this, Google said, but not one from Pizza Hut. Now, it lists this answer directly from Pizza Hut itself, Google says.

Could it be making Google worse?

Almost certainly not. While we can’t say that Google’s gotten better, we do know that Hummingbird — if it has indeed been used for the past month — hasn’t sparked any wave of consumers complaining that Google’s results suddenly got bad. People complain when things get worse; they generally don’t notice when things improve.

Does this mean SEO is dead?

No, SEO is not yet again dead. In fact, Google’s saying there’s nothing new or different SEOs or publishers need to worry about. Guidance remains the same, it says: have original, high-quality content. Signals that have been important in the past remain important; Hummingbird just allows Google to process them in new and hopefully better ways.

Does this mean I’m going to lose traffic from Google?

If you haven’t in the past month, well, you came through Hummingbird unscathed. After all, it went live about a month ago. If you were going to have problems with it, you would have known by now.

By and large, there’s been no major outcry among publishers that they’ve lost rankings. This seems to support Google saying this is very much a query-by-query effect, one that may improve particular searches — particularly complex ones — rather than something that hits “head” terms that can, in turn, cause major traffic shifts.

But I did lose traffic!

Perhaps it was due to Hummingbird, but Google stressed that it could also be due to some of the other parts of its algorithm, which are always being changed, tweaked or improved. There’s no way to know.

How do you know all this stuff?

Google shared some of it at its press event today, and then I talked with two of Google’s top search execs, Amit Singhal and Ben Gomes, after the event for more details. I also hope to do a more formal look at the changes from those conversations in the near future. But for now, hopefully you’ve found this quick FAQ based on those conversations to be helpful.

By the way, another term for the “meaning” connections that Hummingbird does is “entity search,” and we have an entire panel on that at our SMX East search marketing show in New York City, next week. The Coming “Entity Search” Revolution session is part of an entire “Semantic Search” track that also gets into ways search engines are discovering meanings behind words. Learn more about the track and the entire show on the agenda page.



Courtesy to : searchengineland

Local Businesses, Ensure Your AdWords Accounts Are On Target

Paid Advertising Platforms are growing exponentially on what seems like a weekly basis. What once was Keywords + Ad + Bid = Money has now become a full-time job. Bid adjustments, rules, re-marketing, extensions, day-parting, local or geographic targeting, modified broad match, and more — the vocabulary alone is a struggle for small business owners who do their own marketing.local-maps-featured
As I review and overhaul paid advertising campaigns for new clients, I’ve noticed that there are numerous misunderstandings surrounding local paid search advertising in Google and Bing.

For details on how local businesses can ensure their AdWords accounts are on target, check out my Analytics & Marketing column on Marketing Land.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Courtesy to : searchengineland

Yahoo Updates Answers For Social And SEO Value

It’s amazing to me that it took Yahoo so long to update its Answers property. Once a thriving Q&A network and social search site, Yahoo really let Answers go to seed. However the company announced yesterday that it was rolling out a new user-experience including mobile optimization.

Even in its dilapidated state, Yahoo Answers is the most successful “help engine” or Q&A site on the web (don’t tell me it’s Quora). Answers was the site that long ago vanquished Google’s paid answers property.

But the years of product and management turmoil at Yahoo caused tremendous neglect of Answers and myriad other Yahoo properties. Now CEO Marissa Mayer is going through Yahoo’s various products and updating them, especially for mobile.

It’s not unlike renovating a house room by room. Now it’s Answers’ turn.



The new features make Answers more social, incorporate the ability to add images and video and make the site mobile friendly. As a practical matter Answers is the social network Yahoo never had — right under its nose.

With curation and some quality improvements — the quality of a large percentage of Answers’ content is really marginal — Answers could become something tremendously valuable for both users and Yahoo.

Answers could bring more user engagement, search volume, overall traffic and contextually relevant display inventory to Yahoo. Answers is and has been a great SEO property. But if Yahoo concentrates and devotes resources to really making Answers a valuable utility it will rank even more often and more highly.

Courtesy to :  searchengineland

Google: Unlinked URLs Are A Source For Indexing New Content

John Lincoln from Ignite Visibility spotted a Google Hangout where Google’s John Mueller confirmed that Google will use URLs or domain names within content that are unlinked, i.e. without an a href attribute, to discover and index new pages of content.

John went on to add that typically no PageRank or trust is flown from an unlinked URL or citation, but Google may indeed use it for content discovery.

We use those kinds of links to try to discover new content. So for instance if we see that someone has been writing about a new domain name and we can recognize that as a domain name in the text even without a normal HTML link there, then that is something where we will try to pick that domain name up, try to crawl it and index it and see if that is something worth including in our search results.

Sometimes it happens that we pick up a whole URL like that. Sometimes someone will try to shorter a URL with just a ‘…’ in between and we try to crawl that URL so we get it wrong. But our goal here isn’t necessarily to pass any pagerank, which we don’t do with those kinds of links. But rather discover new URLs that we haven’t seen before. And if we see someone write about a URL that we haven’t seen before we will pick that up and try to index that for search.

I believe this may be the first time Google has gone on record about how they use URLs or domains within content that are unlinked, i.e. basic citations.

Courtesy to :  searchengineland

Google’s Matt Cutts: Nofollow Links Won’t Hurt You Unless You Are Spamming At A Huge Scale

In a video released today on the Google Webmaster Help YouTube channel, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts said: typically, links that are nofollowed can’t hurt your rankings in Google.

That being said, while most cases are that links that have the nofollow attribute on them will not negatively impact your rankings in Google. Google did add that if you are mass spamming at a huge scale, Google may take manual action on your links to discourage your spamming, despite the links being nofollowed.

Why would Google take action on links that already are not trust by Google? It appears that some spammers don’t care and they need more of a knock to encourage them to stop link spamming.


Courtesy to : searchengineland

View manual webspam actions in Webmaster Tools

We strive to keep spam out of our users’ search results. This includes both improving our webspam algorithms as well as taking manual action for violations of our quality guidelines. Many webmasters want to see if their sites are affected by a manual webspam action, so today we’re introducing a new feature that should help. The manual action viewer in Webmaster Tools shows information about actions taken by the manual webspam team that directly affect that site’s ranking in Google’s web search results. To try it out, go to Webmaster Tools and click on the “Manual Actions” link under “Search Traffic."

You’ll probably see a message that says, “No manual webspam actions found.” A recent analysis of our index showed that well under 2% of domains we've seen are manually removed for webspam. If you see this message, then your site doesn't have a manual removal or direct demotion for webspam reasons.

If your site is in the very small fraction that do have a manual spam action, chances are we’ve already notified you in Webmaster Tools. We’ll keep sending those notifications, but now you can also do a live check against our internal webspam systems. Here’s what it would look like if Google had taken manual action on a specific section of a site for "User-generated spam":

In this hypothetical example, there isn’t a site-wide match, but there is a “partial match." A partial match means the action applies only to a specific section of a site. In this case, the webmaster has a problem with other people leaving spam on mattcutts.com/forum/. By fixing this common issue, the webmaster can not only help restore his forum's rankings on Google, but also improve the experience for his users. Clicking the "Learn more" link will offer new resources for troubleshooting.

Once you’ve corrected any violations of Google’s quality guidelines, the next step is to request reconsideration. With this new feature, you'll find a simpler and more streamlined reconsideration request process. Now, when you visit the reconsideration request page, you’ll be able to check your site for manual actions, and then request reconsideration only if there’s a manual action applied to your site. If you do have a webspam issue to address, you can do so directly from the Manual Actions page by clicking "Request a review."

The manual action viewer delivers on a popular feature request. We hope it reassures the vast majority of webmasters who have nothing to worry about. For the small number of people who have real webspam issues to address, we hope this new information helps speed up the troubleshooting. If you have questions, come find us in the Webmaster Help Forum or stop by our Office Hours.

Courtesy to : Matt Cutt

Bing To Include Local Product Inventory In Search Results

Yesterday Microsoft and Local Corporation announced a deal in which the latter’s Krillion local product database will be provided to Bing for display in search results. Local Corp. will supply in-stock product data from a range of mostly national-local retailers.

The list of participating retailers includes BestBuy, Costco, Express, Fry’s, Home Depot, Kmart, Lowe’s, Nordstrom, Orchard Supply, Office Depot, Radio Shack, Rite Aid, Sears, Staples, Target, True Value and Wal-Mart. All of the indexed products from these stores — it’s not clear if this includes all in-store inventory — will be available on Bing.

Local Corp. bought local product inventory provider Krillion in early 2011. Through that acquisition Local inherited a potentially sweeping patent (8,032,427) that covers presentation of product inventory data online, for offline retailers.

Bing’s Bill Hankes said, “We think the addition of Local.com’s product data can help consumers by letting them know which brands and categories are in stores. The inclusion of this data, however, does not change the way in which Bing ranks results based on relevance.”

In a way that’s unfortunate because it would create incentives for retailers to get their inventory online.

Local Corp. offered the following statement to me in email: “We’re providing our entire dynamic shopping data set to them. We’ll be coming out with updated growth numbers for our platform (brands, categories, etc.) soon.”

Several years ago there were a number of startups competing to bring local product inventory online. The recession hit some of these startups and stalled their growth. There were also a number of acquisitions in the segment, including NearbyNow by JiWire, Milo by eBay and Killion by Local Corp. Most retailers have also been slow to put their inventory data online and small, independent retailers have done almost nothing in terms of getting their product data onto the internet.

Local product search engine Goodzer (which offers an API) has taken a different approach and crawls retail websites, matching products with store locations. And Yext has an offering that includes some product inventory syndication as part of its larger local data distribution network.

Google has a “in nearby stores” inventory filter in its Shopping Search but the company has not invested in deepening product inventory. The advent of indoor location will likely present a new opportunity to get product inventory data online.

It’s not clear what percentage of product queries are inventory related. However most products are purchased in local stores.

While e-commerce, and more recently m-commerce, has grown into the billions, online shopping remains a fraction of offline consumer spending (5.8 percent of total US retail). Recently I calculated that online-influenced offline spending (“O2O”) represented something approaching $2 trillion annually.

Courtesy to : searchengineland

AdWords Debuts Offline Conversion Tracking For Full Sales Cycle Optimization

Running lead generation campaigns on Google AdWords? Measuring success and optimizing campaigns for actual sealed-deal conversions, not just lead in-take, just got a whole lot easier.

On the heels of rolling out cross-account conversion tracking and search funnels for MCC users, today, Google announced a new feature that allows advertisers to import offline conversions derived from PPC leads back into AdWords.

Once a user clicks on your ad, AdWords assigns a unique click ID (GCLID). That GCLID gets saved along with the lead information you capture. Now when that user completes an offline conversion event, you can upload the GCLID to AdWords along with the type and date of conversion as well as any order value.

Your offline and online conversions are then all included in AdWords to help you optimize your campaigns based on data that encompasses the full sales funnel. You can set up as many offline conversion types as you need — qualified leads, closed sales, etc. — and track and optimize for each step along your sales cycle.

There are also ways to use this new feature to track certain types of online conversions separately from the overall conversion capture, such as orders only from new customers. And if you’re not able to track online conversions at all with Google conversion code, this could be a solution.

Offline conversion tracking does not work for click-to-call at this time because in order for the GCLID to be assigned, a user has to visit the site. Also note that this new feature is independent of Google’s Universal Analytics which aims to capture conversion paths across traffic sources by visitor.

Several marketing software providers including Marketo, Mongoose Metrics, SugarCRM already have guidelines posted on their sites to set up offline conversion tracking. Google published it’s own guidelines for uploading conversion data from Salesforce to AdWords.

Courtesy to :  Searchengineland