Google's Hummingbird Algorithm

As you know, Google announced their Hummingbird algorithm about a month after it launched, claiming no one noticed and no one should notice. But we do think we did notice but no one can confirm that outside of Google and they won't.

That being said, clearly the search results are different since the launch of Hummingbird and SEOs will likely need to adapt.

Some forward thinking SEOs and webmasters are already thinking up what the end game for Google is with Hummingbird and how to adapt their sites to fit that box.

A WebmasterWorld thread has some really interesting conversation around what some believe the key difference is before and after Hummingbird.

Unique Content versus Useful Content

While unique content is more of a Google Panda related thing, useful content although Panda, is maybe more Hummingbird.

Google understands searchers queries differently with Hummingbird than they did before. So how can the search results not change. How can you as a webmaster change your content to make it more useful, while it still being unique, to encourage Google to show your site over your competitors.

Don't optimize for keywords, optimize for a satisfied customer from stage one of the buying cycle to the end. Is it that easy? What if you don't offer all the stages? Well, I assume that is not exactly the point.

Robert believes this will eventually lead to search results that are "less a collection of content farms and more a collection of pages created with the user genuinely in mind." I am not 100% confident.

Keep in mind, this is just one theory of many and for the most part, the search results did not change that much compared to let's say Penguin 2.1.

Google Penguin 2.1

Late Friday afternoon, Google's Matt Cutts announced  on Twitter that they  unleashed Penguin 2.1.

In short, Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam,  said it impacted  about 1%  of search queries.

Looking at the hundreds of  comments on our nippy post from Friday and looking at the threads out there in the webmaster and SEO communities, it seems like many webmasters were impacted by this update.

We have threads at WebmasterWorld, Black Hat Forums, tons at Google Webmaster Help,  Threadwatch and many others. Keep in mind, this was announced late Friday afternoon and the threads are just going to get worse when more people check their analytics after the weekend is over, sometime this morning.

I've seen screen shots of Google Analytics showing websites completely destroyed by this update. I've also seen screen shots of Google Analytics showing websites that recovered in a major way from previous Penguin updates. This had huge swings both ways for webmasters and SEOs. Some recovered and are back in business, while others are about to lose their businesses. Also, some it had no impact on at all. Like you all know, when one web site drops another one takes it place.