We've dealt with Panda and Penguin and all their little baby versions and now we have Hummingbird. (What's up with Google and their fascination with animals?) Anywho - What is this Hummingbird and should we be concerned?
Actually, Hummingbird has been running for several months according to Google sources and they simply announced it just this last week. Google has always been trying to offer us the best and most accurate results when we search and Hummingbird has made it even easier to find exactly what was looking for. The reason they called it Hummingbird is because it’s precise and fast and unless you have seen a major drop in your website over the last 30 to 45 days, chances are Hummingbird has not affected you.
Hummingbird basically means that Google is trying to offer sepcific search results for everything you have searched for. For instance: if you’re looking for information on 'how the affordable care act could cost contractors more', in the past you would receive search results for everything that may or may not have some or all of those words in the title. You may find information on affordable care act, contractors etc. With Hummingbird, Google will offer you a more precise answer to exactly what you’re looking for: "how the affordable care act could cost federal contractors more money". So if you have an article or blog post specifically targeting this phrase, AND its high quality information with a few link backs, chances are Google will choose this blog post or article over others that blanket the general terms.
Your subpages will be more important. So maybe your a commercial real estate broker in Minot ND, if someone wants more information about financing commercial real estate in your area, they are more likely to land on your financing page than your home page.
This is why being intentional with our titles and deliberate with how we are optimizing our blog posts and articles is so extremely important. If you have written quality information, link to it from high-quality sources and title the articles or blog posts exactly for what it is; Google will honor that by having more of those sub-pages show up in the search results when someone is actually searching for that information.
How do you check? If all of your webpages are the same meta-title as the homepage, the whole website might be diluted as all looking the same even if you have different information on different pages. How can you tell if your pages are titled differently? You can either search for the information specifically that’s on a page and see if the description or title of that content shows up in the search results or Firefox can actually show you what the title of every pages that you’re on from the menu bar up at the very top of the browser. This is considered your meta-title. Google is looking for these titles and an accurate description of what the page is about so that it can offer searchers and more accurate result.
“Our guidance to webmasters is the same as always — we encourage original, high-quality content, since that’s what’s best for web users.” - From Google [Source]
Again, if you’ve been doing things right the whole time this shouldn’t affect you at all. Continue to write high-quality content, link to it from a variety of social media and high-quality sources, and make sure your intentional about your titles in your description so that your readers can actually find you; But, It's always best to stay on top of the changes and know what's going on - knowledge is power.
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