[Build Backlinks Online] Hummingbird Unleashed

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Hummingbird Unleashed'

Posted by gfiorelli1
Sometimes I think that us SEOs could be wonderful characters for a Woody Allen
movie: We are stressed, nervous, paranoid, we have a tendency for sudden changes
of mood...okay, maybe I am exaggerating a little bit, but that's how we tend to
(over)react whenever Google announces something.Cases like this webmaster, who
is desperately thinking he was penalized by Hummingbird, are not uncommon.




One thing that doesn't help is the lack of clarity coming from Google, which
not only never mentions Hummingbird in any official document (for example, in
the post of its 15th anniversary), but has also shied away from details of this
epochal update in the "off-the-record" declarations of Amit Singhal. In fact, in
some ways those statements partly contributed to the confusion.
When Google announces an updateâespecially one like
Hummingbirdâthe best thing to do is to avoid trying to immediately
understand what it really is based on intuition alone. It is better to wait
until the dust falls to the ground, recover the original documents, examine
those related to them (and any variants), take the time to see the update in
action, calmly investigate, and then after all that try to find the most
plausible answers.
This method is not scientific (and therefore the answers can't be defined as
"surely correct"), it is philological, and when it comes to Google and its
updates, I consider it a great method to use.
The original documents are the story for the press of the event during which
Google announced Hummingbird, and the FAQ that Danny Sullivan published
immediately after the event, which makes direct reference to what Amit Singhal
said.
Related documents are the patents that probably underlie Hummingbird, and the
observations that experts like Bill Slawski, Ammon Johns, Rand Fishkin, Aaron
Bradley and others have derived.
This post is the result of my study of those documents and field observations.

Why did Amit Singhal mix apples with oranges?

When announcing Hummingbird, Amit Singhal said that it wasn't since Caffeine
in 2010 that the Google Algorithm was updated so deeply.


The problem is that Caffeine wasn't an algorithmic change; it was an
infrastructural change.


Caffeine's purpose, in fact, was to optimize the indexation of the billions of
Internet documents Google crawls, presenting a richer, bigger, and fresher pool
of results to the users.


Instead, Hummingbird's objective is not a newer optimization of the indexation
process, but to better understand the users' intent when searching, thereby
offering the most relevant results to them.


Nevertheless, we can affirm that Hummingbird is also an infrastructural
update, as it governs the more than 200 elements that make up Google's
algorithm.




The (maybe unconscious) association Amit Singhal created between Caffeine and
Hummingbird should tell us:

That Hummingbird would not be here if Caffeine wasn't deployed in 2010, and
hence it should be considered an evolution of Google Search, and not a
revolution.
Moreover, that Hummingbird should be considered Google's most ambitious attempt
to solve all the algorithmic issues that Caffeine caused.

Let me explain this last point.


Caffeine, quitting the so-called "Sand Box," caused the SERPs to be flooded
with poor-quality results.


Google reacted by creating "patches" like Panda, Penguin, and the exact-match
domain (EMD) updates, among others.


But these updates, so effective in what we define as middle- and head-tail
queries, were not so effective for a type of query thatâmainly because of
the fast adoption of mobile search by the usersâmore and more people have
begun to use: conversational long tail queries, or those that Amit Singhal has
defined as "verbose queries."


The evolution of natural language recognition by Google, the improved ability
to disambiguate entities and concepts through technology inherited from Metaweb
and improved with Knowledge Graph, and the huge improvements made in the SERPs'
personalized customization have given Google the theoretical and practical tools
not only for solving the problem of long-tail queries, but also for giving a
fresh start to the evolution of Google Search.


That is the backstory that explains what Amit Singhal told about Hummingbird,
paraphrased here by Danny Sullivan:


[Hummingbird] Gave us an opportunity [...] to take synonyms and knowledge
graph and other things Google has been doing to understand meaning to rethink
how we can use the power of all these things to combine meaning and predict how
to match your query to the document in terms of what the query is really wanting
and are the connections available in the documents. and not just random
coincidence that could be the case in early search engines.

How does Hummingbird work?

"To take synonyms and knowledge graph and other things..."


Google has been working with synonyms for a long time. If we look at the
timeline Google itself shared in its 15th anniversary post, it has used them
since 2002, even though we can also tell that disambiguation (meant as
orthographic analysis of the queries) has been applied since 2001.




Last year Vanessa Fox wrote "Is Google's Synonym Matching Increasing?..." on
Search Engine Land.


Reading that post and seeing the examples presented, it is clear that synonyms
were already used by Googleâin connection with the user intent underlying
the queryâin order to broaden the query and rewrite it to offer the best
results to the users.


That same post, though, shows us why only using a thesaurus of synonyms or
relying on the knowledge of the highly ranked queries was not enough to assure
relevant SERPs (see how Vanessa points out how Google doesn't consider "dogs"
pets in the query "pet adoption," but does consider "cats").


Amit Singhal, in this old patent, was also conscious that only relying on
synonyms was not a perfect solution, because two words may be synonyms and may
not be so depending on the context they are used (i.e.: "coche" and
"autom³vil" both mean "car" in Spanish, but "carro" only means "car" in
Latin American Spanish, meaning "wagon" in Spain).


Therefore, in order to deliver the best results possible using semantic
search, what Google needed to understand better, easier, and faster was context.
Hummingbird is how Google solved that need.





Synonyms remain essential; Amit Singhal confirmed that in the post-event talk
with Danny Sullivan. How they are used now has been described by Bill Slawski in
this post, where he dissects the Synonym identification based on co-occurring
terms patent.


That patent, then is also based on the concept of "search entities," which I
described in my last post here on Moz, when talking about personalized search.


Speaking literally, words are not "things" themselves but the verbal
representation of things, and search entities are how Google objectifies words
into concepts. An object may have a relationship with others that may change
depending on the context in which they are used together. In this sense, words
are treated like people, cities, books, and all the other named entities usually
related to the Knowledge Graph.


The mechanisms Google uses in identifying search entities are especially
important in disambiguating the different potential meanings of a word, and
thereby refining the information retrieval accordingly to a "probability score."


This technique is not so different from what the Knowledge Graph does when
disambiguating, for instance, Saint Peter the Apostle from Saint Peter the
Basilica or Saint Peter the city in Minnesota.


Finally, there is a third concept playing an explicit role in what could be
the "Hummingbird patent:" co-occurrences.


Integrating these three elements, Google now is (in theory) able:

To better understand the intent of a query;
To broaden the pool of web documents that may answer that query;
To simplify how it delivers information, because if query A, query B, and query
C substantively mean the same thing, Google doesn't need to propose three
different SERPs, but just one;
To offer a better search experience, because expanding the query and better
understanding the relationships between search entities (also based on
direct/indirect personalization elements), Google can now offer results that
have a higher probability of satisfying the needs of the user.
As a consequence, Google may present better SERPs also in terms of better ads,
because in 99% of the cases, verbose queries were not presenting ads in their
SERPs before Hummingbird.





Maybe Hummingbird could have solved Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers speaking
issues...

90% of the queries affected, seriously?

Many SEOs have questioned the fact that Hummingbird has affected the 90% of
all queries for the simple reason they didn't notice any change in traffic and
rankings.


Apart from the fact that the SERPs were in constant turmoil between the end of
August and the first half of September, during which time Hummingbird first saw
the light (though it could just be a coincidence, quite an opportune one
indeed), the typical query that Hummingbird targets is the conversational one
(e.g.: "What is the best pizzeria to eat at close to Piazza del Popolo e via del
Corso?"), a query that usually is not tracked by us SEOs (well, apart from Dr.
Pete, maybe).


Moreover, Hummingbird is about queries, not keywords (much less long-tail
ones), as was so well explained by Ammon Johns in his post "Hummingbird - The
opposite of long-tail search." For that reason, tracking long-tail rankings as a
metric of the impact of Hummingbird is totally wrong.


Finally, Hummingbird has not meant the extinction of all the classic ranking
factors, but is instead a new framework set upon them. If a site was both
authoritative and relevant for a query, it still will be ranking as well as it
was before Hummingbird.


So, which sites got hit? Probably those sites that were relying just on very
long tail keyword-optimized pages, but had no or very low authority. Therefore,
as Rand said in his latest Whiteboard Friday, now it is far more convenient to
create better linkable/shareable content, which also semantically relates to
long-tail keywords, than it is to create thousands of long tail-based pages with
poor or no quality or utility.

If Hummingbird is a shift to semantic SEO, does that mean that using Schema.org
will make my site rank better?

One of the myths that spread very fast when Hummingbird was announced was that
it is heavily using structured data as a main factor.


Although it is true that for some months now Google has stressed the
importance of structured data (for example, dedicating a section to it in Google
Webmaster Tools), considering Schema.org as the magic solution is not correct.
It is an example of how us SEOs sometimes confuse the means with the purpose.




What we need to do is offer Google easily understandable context for the
topics around which we have created a page, and structured data are helpful in
this respect. By themselves, however, they are not enough. As mentioned before,
if a page is not considered authoritative (thanks to external links and
mentions), it most likely will not have enough strength for ranking well,
especially now that long-tail queries are simplified by Hummingbird.

Is Hummingbird related to the increased presence of the Knowledge Graph and
Answers Cards?

Many people came up with the idea that Hummingbird is the translation of the
Knowledge Graph to the classic Google Search, and that it has a direct
connection with the proliferation of the Answer Cards. This theory led to some
very angry posts ranting against the "scraper" nature of Google.


This is most likely due to the fact that Hummingbird was announced alongside
new features of Knowledge Graph, but there is no evident relationship between
Hummingbird and Knowledge Graph.


What many have thought as being a cause (Hummingbird causing more Knowledge
Graph and Answer Cards, hence being the same) is most probably a simple
correlation.


Hummingbird substantially simplified verbose queries into less verbose ones,
the latter of which are sometimes complemented with the constantly expanding
Knowledge Graph. For that reason, we see a greater number of SERPs presenting
Knowledge Graph elements and Answer Cards.


That said, the philosophy behind Hummingbird and the Knowledge Graph is the
same, moving from strings to things.

Is Hummingbird strongly based on the Knowledge Base?

The Knowledge Base is potent and pervasive in how Google works, but reducing
Hummingbird to just the Knowledge Base would be simplistic.




As we saw, Hummingbird relies on several elements, the Knowledge Base being
one of them, especially in all queries with personalization (which should be
considered a pervasive layer that affects the algorithm).


If Hummingbird was heavily relying on the Knowledge Base, without
complementing it with other factors, we could fall into the issues that Amit
Singhal was struggling with in the earlier patent about synonyms.

Does Hummingbird mean the end of the link graph?

No. PageRank and link-related elements of the algorithm are still alive and
kicking. I would also dare to say that links are even more important now.


In fact, without the authority a good link profile grants to a site, a web
page will have even more difficulty ranking now (see what I wrote just above
about the fate of low-authority pages).


What is even more important now is the context in which the link is present.
We already learned this with Penguin, but Hummingbird reaffirms how inbound
links from topically irrelevant contexts are bad links.


That said, Google still has to improve on the link front, as Danny Sullivan
said well in this tweet:




Links are the fossil fuel of search relevancy signals. Polluted. Not getting
better. And yet, that's what Google Hummingbird drinks most.
â Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 18, 2013


At the same time, though (again because of context and entity recognition),
brand co-occurrences and co-citations assume an even more important role with
Hummingbird.

Is Hummingbird related to 100% (not provided)?

The fact that Hummingbird and 100% (not provided) were rolled out at almost
the same time seems to be more than just a coincidence.


If Hummingbird is more about search entities, better information retrieval,
and query expansionâan update where keywords by themselves have lost part
of the omnipresent value they hadâthen relying on keyword data alone is
not enough anymore.


We should stop focusing only on keyword optimization and start thinking about
topical optimization.


This obliges us to think about great content, and not just about "content."
Things like "SEO copywriting" will end up being the same as "amazing
copywriting."


For that, as SEOs, we should start understanding how search entities work, and
not simply become human thesauruses of synonyms.


If Hummingbird is a giant step toward Semantic SEO, then as SEOs, our job "is
not about optimizing for strings, or for things, but for the connections between
things," as brilliantly says Aaron Bradley in this post and deck for SMX East.






Semantic SEO - The Shift From Strings To Things by Aaron Bradley #SMX from
Search Marketing Expo - SMX

What must we do to be Hummingbird-friendly?

Let me ask you few questions, and try to answer them sincerely:

When creating/optimizing a site, are you doing it with a clear audience in your
mind?
When performing on-page optimization for your site, are you following at least
these SEO best practices?
Using a clear and not overly complex information architecture;
Avoiding canonicalization issues;
Avoiding thin-content issues;
Creating a semantic content model;
Topically optimizing the content of the site on a page-by-page basis, using
natural and semantically rich language and with a landing page-centric strategy
in mind;
Creating useful content using several formats, that you yourself would like to
share with your friends and link to;
Implementing Schema.org, Open Graph and semantic mark-ups.

Are your link-building objectives:
Better brand visibility?
Gaining referral traffic?
Enhancing the sense of thought leadership of your brand?
Topically related sites and/or topically related sections of a more generalist
site (i.e.: News site)?

As an SEO, is social media offering these advantages?
Wider brand visibility;
Social echo;
Increased mentions/links in the form of derivatives, co-occurrences, and
co-citation in others' web sites;
Organic traffic and brand ambassadors' growth.


If you answered yes to all these questions, you don't have to do anything but
keep up the good work, refine it, and be creative and engaging. You were likely
already seeing your site ranking well and gaining traffic thanks to the more
holistic vision of SEO you have.

If you answered no to few of them, then you have just to correct the things
you're doing wrong and follow the so-called SEO best practices (and the 2013 Moz
Ranking Factors are a good list of best practices).


If you sincerely answered no to many of them, then you were having problems
even before Hummingbird was unleashed, and things won't get better with it if
you don't radically change your mindset.


Hummingbird is not asking us to rethink SEO or to reinvent the wheel. It is
simply asking us to not do crappy SEO... but that is something we should know
already, shouldn't we?
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