Algorithm Updates

What is the Hummingbird Update?

“Hummingbird” is the name of the new search platform that Google is using as of September 2013, the name comes from being “precise and fast” and is designed to better focus on the meaning behind the words. 

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.

Google 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.

What is the Panda Update?

Panda is to improve the search in Google. The latest version has focused on quality content, proper design, proper speed, proper use of images and many more.

What Is The Penquin Update?

Penguin is the code name for Google algorithm. Its main target is to decrease the ranking of that website that are violating the Google Webmaster guidelines. These guidelines are violated by using black hat techniques like cloaking and stuffing.

What Is The Google Pigeon Update?

(Launched on July 24, 2014 for U.S.)

English results, the “Pigeon Update” is a new algorithm to provide more useful, relevant and accurate local search results that are tied more closely to traditional web search ranking signals. Google stated that this new algorithm improves their distance and location ranking parameters.

What is Google Pirate Update?

Google’s Pirate Update is a filter introduced in August 2012 designed to prevent sites with many copyright infringement reports, as filed through Google’s DMCA system, from ranking well in Google’s listings. The filter is periodically updated. When this happens, sites previously impacted may escape, if they’ve made the right improvements. The filter may also catch new sites that escaped being caught before, plus it may release “false positives” that were caught.

What is Google Payday Update?

(Launched on June 11, 2013) – The “Payday Update” was a new algorithm targeted at cleaning up search results for traditionally “spammy queries” such as [payday loan], pornographic and other heavily spammed queries.

What is Google Mobile Friendly Update?

What Is Mobilegeddon & The Google Mobile Friendly Update

On April 21, 2015, Google will release a significant new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that’s designed to give a boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results.

The change, which will take about a week to complete, is so significant that the date it actually happens is being referred to by a variety of names. Here at Search Engine Land, we’re calling itmobilegeddon, but sometimes it’s also referred to as mobilepocalyse, mopocalypse ormobocalypse.

One of the best ways to prepare is to test that Google considers your web pages to be mobile-friendly by using its Mobile-Friendly Test tool. More about the algorithm, including ways to bring improve the mobile-friendliness of your pages, is below.

Also consider attending Search Engine Land’s upcoming SMX Advanced search conference, where we have a special session on the topic: Mobilegeddon! Surviving Google’s Mobile Friendly Update.

What is the Hummingbird Bird?

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.

Why is it called Hummingbird?
Google told us the name come from being “precise and fast.”

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.

For the People - SEO Trained

Nothing has changed. If you have original, high-quality content, and you have high-quality and relevant websites linking to your own website, then your website is still going to rank well. If anything, your website’s rankings will improve just as they should have after the Penguin and Panda updates rolled out.

The key to making the right decisions about SEO is to understand where Google is going. Google’s goal is that when someone creates a new search, what Google shows that person is exactly what the person wants or needs. We’ve all had the experience of searching on Google and seeing websites come up that obviously aren’t what we want. We don’t even need to click on the link to figure that out, because what Google shows us is enough. When this happens to me I think “Good heavens, why in the world would Google think that’s what I wanted when I typed in those words?” Google wants to get to the point where I never think that again. To lose sight of this goal would be the death of Google. This is, in part, why Google employs a few thousand PhDs.

Many people have been frustrated by Panda and Penguin, and they’ll now see Hummingbird in a negative light. Don’t fall into that trap. If you’re the best at what you do, these updates Google has been rolling out are opportunities to separate yourself from your competition. They may have been engaging in spammy tactics to get good rankings, but if you’ve been focusing on creating content that provides real value to potential customers, their days are numbered. These changes will help you rise above, and the good news, as mentioned above, is if you’ve been doing the right things for your SEO you don’t need to change a thing.

Have you seen any impact to your website(s) as a result of the Hummingbird update? Do you see any details in the update you feel will give you an advantage?

Update: After contacting Google’s press department I was informed that Google has been running Hummingbird “for a few months,” not just since last month. The press department also reiterated their guidance for those doing SEO, “Our guidance to webmasters is the same as always — we encourage original, high-quality content, since that’s what’s best for web users.”

Why Penguin 2.1 AND Penguin 5?

If us talking about Penguin 5 in reference to something Google is calling Penguin 2.1 hurts your head, believe us, it hurts ours, too. But you can pin that blame back on Google. Here’s why. When Google started releasing its “Panda” algorithm designed to fight low-quality content, it called the first one simply “Panda.” So when the second came out, people referred to that as “Panda 2.” When the third came out, people called that Panda 3 — causing Google to say that the third release, because it was relatively minor, really only should be called Panda 2.1 — the “point” being used to indicate how much a minor change it was. Google eventually — and belatedly — indicated that a Panda 3 release happened, causing the numbering to move into Panda 3.0, Panda 3.1 and so on until there had been so many “minor” updates that we having to resort to going further out in decimal places to things like Panda 3.92. That caused us here at Search Engine Land to decide it would be easier all around if we just numbered any confirmed update sequentially, in order of when they came. No matter how “big” or “small” an update might be, we’d just give it the next number on the list: Penguin 1, Penguin 2, Penguin 3 and so on.

Difference between Google panda and Google Penguin

SEO marketers would have surely loved to receive a heads up regarding the fine details of the Google Panda and Google Penguin updates. The now infamous search engine updates that caused several brands to lose visibility, and forced even more to make dramatic changes to their search engine optimization strategy.

Matt Cutts, one of the top software engineers at Google, actually warned the public about some of the changes in an interview. Cutt’s friendly heads up involved two main issues regarding search:

Over optimization will start to negatively affect rankings.

The quality of content will soon be more of a focal point when determining rankings.

In Cutt’s own words, Google is attempting to “level the playing field” by essentially giving both SEO marketers with great optimization skills and great content an equal opportunity to increase their visibility in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). The mission is all about enhancing the efficiency of the so-called “GoogleBot”, the company’s software that crawls the web and indexes pages, and in turn, create a more relevant and useful experience for the internet searcher. As a result, those who go overboard with their SEO will start to be penalized, while those who improve in the quality department will be rewarded.

Google Panda

Google dropped the bomb that was the Panda update in February of 2011. As you probably know, Google Panda had some complex components to it, but its primary objectives were simple – penalize sites with lower quality content and in the process, return sites with high quality content to the top of the results where they belong.

Google Penguin

Google launched the Penguin update in April 2012. This focused more on tackling spam and penalizing sites that didn’t follow Google’s quality guidelines. Google Penguin also looks to tackling Black hat SEO techniques that many sites use to increase their search engine ranking. This includes techniques like;

Keyword/keyphrases stuffing within content.

Comment spamming by including links using the same anchor text.

Links from article directories and directory listings.

Having excessive/unnatural internal links.

Too many external links pointing to your site that use the exact same anchor text.

Excessive links from low quality sites.

Google’s initiative to level the playing field is just another step in the road to making quality more important than quantity. It may take SEO marketers some getting used to, but those who want to keep benefiting from search traffic will embrace the Google Panda and Google Penguin updates and do what it takes to keep their rankings intact.