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00:34 – A massive announcement from Google
00:57 – Google changed the engine, not its parts
01:19 – Why call it Hummingbird?
01:41 – As a business owner, what does that mean for you?
02:10 – What does Hummingbird actually do?
03:15 – Is the old algorithm really gone?
04:04 – Is this going to affect your rankings?

 

Transcription starts here:

Hi, Fiona Soutter here, from Super Savvy Business, with this week’s Traffic Word of the Week.

00:34 – A massive announcement from Google

Now, there has been a massive announcement from Google last week; they have released a brand new algorithm called Hummingbird.

Now I know you’ve heard me talking a lot about algorithm updates such as Panda or Penguin and these have just been updates to an existing algorithm but now what Google have done is completely replaced the algorithm all together.

00:57 – Google changed the engine, not its parts

So what we can do to try and help you to understand is if you can think about the algorithm as being an engine in a car and the Panda and the Penguin updates were really just replacements of certain parts of the engine itself.

What Google have done now is replace the engine with a brand new set of ways to calculate things.

01:19 – Why call it Hummingbird?

Why they called it Hummingbird?

Because it means “precise and fast”. Because what Google is trying to do is return much better results which are more precise for the user but do it in a very fast way.

This update was actually released over a month ago but they didn’t actually announce it until late last week. So most people didn’t even realize that this was going on.

01:41 – As a business owner, what does that mean for you?

As a business owner, what does that mean for you?

First of all, it still comes down to making sure that you are continually creating good quality content on a consistent basis.

Does that mean that SEO is dead? No, it doesn’t; Google is still sending us the message to practice the right ways of marketing our businesses online through quality content, encouraging social interaction, video – all of those things are still very very important when it comes to Hummingbird.

02:10 – What does Hummingbird actually do?

So what does Hummingbird actually do? Where is it different, really, compared to the old algorithm?

As far as what we know so far, what is really targeting is the voice activated search. That has been available through Chrome some time but it wasn’t quite as precise as what it is now.

So for instance, if you did voice activated search and you said, “Where is the place I can buy an iPhone 5S?” the old search algorithm would just pick up the words “buy”, “iPhone”, “5”, “s” and perhaps they would try and find areas close to where you are searching from.

Whereas now, the new algorithm is actually going to take into consideration a lot more the words in your search such as “place”, so you know you are looking for a bricks and mortar; they will be looking for shops that are actually close by to your address.

This voice activated search is also known as “Conversational Search”.

03:15 – Is the old algorithm really gone?

The other thing you might be wondering is, did Google throw all of the old algorithm?

No, they didn’t. There are still parts of the old algorithm still being used and I like to still use the idea that the algorithm is really – if you imagine – a whole room full of empty buckets. And all those buckets need to be filled in order to increase the chances of your website ranking for certain keywords.

So those sorts of things haven’t changed; it’s just that what we’re putting into those buckets; some of those buckets might have changed a little bit, but we just need to really focus on the main things, which is quality, quality content.

At the end of the day, you know, the signals that Google was paying attention to for this algorithm change still come into place; it’s just they are processing them in a different way.

04:04 – Is this going to affect your rankings?

The big question you might be asking is: “Is this going to affect my traffic? Is it going to affect my rankings?”

Well, I have done a lot of research and been looking into this; from what I can gather, the word on the street is that no, it shouldn’t be affecting your ranking or your traffic.

Check your Google Analytics account just to be sure, because it has been rolled out over the past month and if you have noticed a change maybe you need to have a look at the practices that you are doing and ensuring that you are doing all the white hat strategies that Google encourages us to use to market our websites and market our businesses online. But by and large, you shouldn’t notice a change in your ranking or your traffic.

So that’s all we have on Hummingbird for now but as more news comes to light I will be certainly keeping you in the loop.

Just before I go:

I you are in the Sydney area and you are looking for a way to get your content marketing up and running or you are finding that it is taking too long, you don’t really know how to repurpose content or how to syndicate it or make it go viral, I am actually going to hold a live, one-day workshop the first weekend of November 2013.

So if you are around Sydney at that time please be sure to contact me directly through my website at supersavvybusiness.com; find out about this workshop: it’s a one-day workshop where I am actually going to be giving away to all the participants my complete workflow on how I manage my content marketing strategy. I have not done this before apart from my private coaching clients from the Savvy Mastermind program.

My name is Fiona Soutter from Super Savvy Business and you’ve been listening to the Traffic Word of the Week update.