Google Hummingbird — that’s the subject of this lesson. What exactly Google Hummingbird is and how it works. When the Mountain View company released it. What real impact the Hummingbird algorithm had on search, and therefore on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). How it fits together with Google Panda, Google Penguin and the other filters. Which kinds of search it helps. And plenty more besides.
As you’ll know, in our SEO Academy we cover every topic connected to ranking on search engines. If you’re new here, have a look at the earlier lessons — we’ve covered a number of things that will help you follow this article.
If this lesson interests you, it’s probably because you want to understand exactly how Google Hummingbird works, so you can adapt your SEO strategy and reach your business goals.
So let’s not waste any more time — here we go!
Want to become an SEO guru?
Thinking about starting a career in SEO?
Got a site you want to optimize for search yourself?
Get in touch and ask about our SEO courses!
I want more info
What is Google Hummingbird?
Hummingbird is the official name of an update to Google’s search algorithm. If you haven’t read the earlier lessons, a reminder: the algorithm is the “software”, the “program” Google uses to solve search problems — to order the information in its index so as to return useful, relevant results to the user.
Google Hummingbird is thought to have shipped around 30 August 2013, but Big G only announced it at a press conference nearly a month later, on 26 September 2013 (more here). The event was held in Menlo Park, in the garage where exactly 15 years earlier Larry Page and Sergey Brin had founded Google Inc.
In his talk (later summarised in a post you can find here), Amit Singhal, head of Google’s search team, mentioned Hummingbird without revealing what had actually changed.
Which queries does it affect?
The update touches 90% of search queries, though not too harshly. A study by Searchmetrics (here) found that since release, the loss of traffic and ranking recorded across the different query types runs at 4–6%.
The hardest hit are question and informational queries, more so than navigational ones. According to Moz (here), there were smaller effects on local search too.
But the Google Hummingbird update is anything but minor.
Image from stramark.nl
Why does it matter?
Since I joined Google in 2001, this is the first time the algorithm has been so heavily rewritten. In 2010 the “Caffeine update” was a big change, but it only helped Google index information rather than sort it.
That’s Singhal, in an interview given on the margins of the press event to Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land (more here).
What Singhal’s words make clear is that this was an “infrastructural” change to the algorithm, not a simple update or an added component.
Hummingbird nonetheless still uses Google Panda, Google Penguin, PageRank and other components inside it.
How is Hummingbird different?
Unlike Google Panda and Google Penguin, Hummingbird doesn’t set out to penalize low-quality content in the SERP. Its declared aim is to grasp — with the speed and precision of a hummingbird — the exact search intent behind complex queries, the “conversational” and “contextual” kind, and to return results that match what users actually need.
Designed to apply its technology to the billions of pages on the web, Google Hummingbird aims to improve the quality of results for that type of query. In terms of what it adds to search, Hummingbird together with the knowledge graph is a turning point for Google and another important step towards a semantic search engine.
Image from ownstartup.com
How does Google Hummingbird work?
To explain how Google Hummingbird works, let’s first touch on two of the things it most affects: semantic search and the knowledge graph.
Let’s take them in turn.
Knowledge graph
Released on 4 May 2012, the knowledge graph (more here) is a feature of Google’s algorithm that brings the search engine closer to the user. It’s a database holding information about people, things, brands, entities, products and places.
Through data mining — extracting knowledge from structured, interlinked information — Big G can give the user detailed, personalised information for a given query. Adding further capabilities to the knowledge graph in 2013, such as comparisons and “filters” for expanding searches, improved how well it answers.
Image from searchmetrics
For the chosen query (in our example, “chocolate”), Google returns organic results and blue links to useful content in the SERP, but also a set of knowledge graph information. That includes an answer box with geo-located pointers to where you can buy it. A panel on the right gives nutritional information and suggestions for related searches.
Image from Google.com
But how does Big G determine that the result for our example query, or any other, reflects the user’s search intent and needs? The answer is semantic search.
Semantic search
What is semantic search in web search engines?
It’s a process of information retrieval (IR) from pages and documents that takes into account the search context, the searcher’s location, variations in wording, synonyms and co-occurrences, concept matching, generalised and natural-language queries, the searcher’s intent and the contextual meaning of the terms used, in order to return more relevant results (source: Wikipedia).
How does Hummingbird do it?
Semantics is a complex subject, so to explain how Hummingbird works we’ll borrow the useful example Singhal himself used.
Take this conversational query:
What’s the closest place to my home to buy an iPhone 5s?
Before Hummingbird, a traditional search engine would have set about serving a useful result by looking for pages containing the individual keywords (“buy” and “iPhone 5s”, say).
Google Hummingbird instead tries to grasp the meaning behind the words. How? Through geolocation it can tell where the searcher physically is; from “close to my home” it works out this is a physical store rather than an online one; and because we’re talking about an iPhone 5s, it knows this is an electronic device sold in certain shops rather than others.
Knowing all those meanings helps Google go beyond search based on keywords alone.
In other words, the new algorithm identifies and interprets the entire query and the relationships between the groups of words inside it. In doing so it weighs the context of the different words as a whole, aiming to return content that answers the query’s full meaning rather than just some of its terms.
Hummingbird and complex queries
Google Hummingbird was designed to understand concepts and the relationships between keywords in a way that resembles a human. Big G has worked for many years on the semantic side, and with Hummingbird and its integration with the knowledge graph the improvement is significant.
The Searchmetrics study mentioned earlier includes a measure of how consistent search results are for keyword pairs, based on an analysis of semantically similar queries. Run in three stages between July 2013 and January 2014, it found that with Hummingbird there was a 20% improvement in the accuracy of results for semantically similar queries.
That’s a step forward, but not enough.
Free to use image from Google
It still happens that for a keyword, concept or entity not yet in the knowledge graph, semantic analysis produces results of little relevance to the user — as in the screenshot below.
Image from Google.com
To understand the intent behind new queries, Big G therefore paired Hummingbird with Google RankBrain, an algorithm that uses machine learning (find out more) and neural matching — artificial intelligence, in other words.
In 2015 RankBrain was folded into Hummingbird, and a Bloomberg article, Google Turning Its Lucrative Web Search Over to AI Machines, named it one of the three main ranking factors.
Thanks to artificial intelligence and improved natural language processing (NLP), the new algorithm can now learn on its own and return useful, relevant results.
The improvements in Google Hummingbird leave marketers and SEOs with two questions:
- Is SEO dead?
- Is PageRank still in use?
Read on and you’ll find out…
Want an SEO analysis of your site?
Want to know how many keywords you rank for on Google?
Want to know your website’s organic traffic?
Want to know who your competitors are and how they’re performing?
Want to know the number of backlinks pointing to your site?
No problem, we’ll tell you. FREE!
Google Hummingbird & SEO
Yes, PageRank is still in use, and it’s one of the 200-plus factors and 10,000 “sub-signal” variations (more here) that Big G weighs when ranking.
No, SEO is not dead! But with Hummingbird the way Search Engine Optimization is done does change.
Voice search & mobile search
The release of Google Hummingbird and the greater use of long-tail keywords in searches — the hallmark of natural language — go hand in hand with strong growth in mobile search and voice search (smartphones, tablets, Siri, Google Assistant, Chrome apps and so on).
Optimizing pages and sites for voice and mobile search therefore remains critical, particularly for local SEO.
Structured data
The improvements the new algorithm brought to semantic search make schema.org markup more important still.
Giving more information about your content through structured data makes it easier for search engines to categorise and connect the dots between entities on the web. And when it shows up in a rich snippet, structured data can lift your click-through rate (CTR).
Image from stramark.nl
Links
Directly, Hummingbird has little effect on link building, but its indirect effects matter.
Links still matter as signals to Big G about the authority and credibility of content — just not as much as creating quality content does. With the new algorithm, bounce rate, lower levels of social sharing and other quality signals are picked up faster. Link building therefore has to focus on giving the user real value.
The Search Engine Land post Did Hummingbird eat link building? offers this useful advice:
- develop quality content
- learn about and get to know the influencers in your sector or region
- take an active part in online communities
- where appropriate, consider asking your friends to share your content
- favour earned links — acquire links naturally wherever you can
and also consider:
- using keywords and synonyms in anchor text
- where needed, optimizing the anchor text of your internal links for semantically relevant keywords
- checking that the anchor text of external links is relevant
Keywords & content creation
In trying to grasp search intent by weighing the context of the whole query, Google Hummingbird marks the shift from searching by strings of keywords to searching by concepts, or entities.
The new algorithm puts great emphasis on the uniqueness, originality and quality of content, and asks SEOs to abandon a mainly keyword-driven approach in favour of one that creates a great user experience.
To create relevant content in line with the new algorithm, follow these best practices:
- work to understand what your audience wants and establish which types of query they use to find your brand, products and services. Make sure your content properly answers each of the following query types:
- conversational queries: write using the everyday language your users use, rather than forcing keywords in.
- informational queries: create content with high informational value, Wikipedia-style.
- navigational queries: queries that include your company or product name. One way to help climb the SERPs for brand keywords is to have them mentioned in relevant content.
- transactional queries: use appropriate transactional keywords in your content.
- check which of your pages generate the most value and which content contributes most to ROI
- use synonyms and co-occurrences: in trying to understand a page’s content, the new algorithm looks not only at individual keywords but at the presence of synonyms, related terms, LSI and co-occurrences. The ones judged most relevant will be favoured for ranking. Google shows in the SERP not only results for the exact keyword or phrase but also ones covering related topics.
Image from link-assistant.com
That extra exposure is a real opportunity for sites and brands. So use these kinds of terms in your title tags and meta descriptions as well as in the body text.
To widen your keyword research, use SEO tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Search Console and Ubersuggest.
Co-citations
Co-citations are another signal that lets Google work out what a site or company does and how authoritative it is (two factors that feed into where content ranks).
The mechanism works like this: if a site (1) is mentioned on sites A, B and C alongside its competitors (2, 3 and 4), then as far as Google is concerned there’s an associative relationship between the four websites (see the diagram).
To encourage authoritative sites to mention your site, brand, products or services:
- identify your competitors using one of the tools mentioned earlier, or run a Google search for “the best [generic term for your product] of 2019”
- run a link profile check on your competitor to see who links to them and whether there’s an opening for you
Conclusion
In this lesson of your favourite SEO Academy we’ve covered Google Hummingbird. You now have what you need to understand how this algorithm works and why it matters, so you can redefine your SEO strategy.
That isn’t enough on its own. Search engines keep working to pin down users’ exact search intent so as to serve useful, relevant results for a given query.
Machine learning, neural matching, artificial intelligence, semantic SEO — these are important developments that keep changing how SEO is done, and we’ll cover where they lead in the lessons ahead.
Stay tuned and keep following us — in the next lessons of the SEO Academy we’ll get into plenty more interesting territory…
Want to improve your site’s SEO ranking? Want to optimize your site, get found by your customers on Google and beat the competition? Get in touch! We’ll work out the best SEO strategy for your site.
Want to sharpen your SEO knowledge? Get in touch! We’ll find the right SEO course for you.
Want to ask us something or just talk to us? Get in touch! That’s what we’re here for.