No, Google’s Hummingbird Update Isn’t A Soul Stealer

Every opportunity to improve how consumers, researchers or general interest groups get information is always shed in negative light.  Read thousands of blogs; everyone fears SEO just died, went to search engine heaven and will never return.  98% of those search optimization professionals casting algorithmic changes into purgatory are probably ones you’d better not hire, anyway.

For those creating noteworthy content, linking relevantly and playing by Google’s ever-growing rulebook, you’ll notice nothing more than several hundred new customers beating down your door for assistance. Here’s more about what Google expects (and always has expected) when optimizing websites for yourself, or your clients:

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Newsworthy, Yet Non-Plagiarized

Google has consistently warned people about writing nonsense content that takes one or more ideologies, rehashes them, and spreads mixed signals to the masses.  Also called commerce journalism, writing about products or services solely to harvest new customers does little to actually educate our future Internet users; evergreen content, news, factual how-to’s and other prose which spreads positivity towards the end user is suggested.  Unless you intend on selling affiliate products forever, perhaps you’ll need to spend several hours reading great content on Forbes, Tech Crunch or other authoritative websites before writing content for your website.

Stop Whining About Updates

This newly martyrized Hummingbird update has been going on for several months.  Online blogs make this update seem like an unwarranted ninja attack.  When Google, Bing or Ask update their algorithms, marketers that have been working diligently and ethically will see nothing different; black-hatters, Cybersquatters and people building links with unethicality at heart will suffer.  Until your website suffers a spam or manual action penalty, stop whining and do your SEO jobs with tact– Google won’t coddle you, nor will your clients.  You screw up and jeopardize your clients’ positions, better start submitting resumes elsewhere.

Understand the Meaning of Improvements

Again, we revert back to those whining about Panda’s, Penguins, Hummingbirds, and other changes to our search world.  Remember: the underlying purpose of improving our searches revolves around the person looking for something.  Anything. If you’re selling soap, Google is ranking you according to relevance, popularity, and overall consumer reaction.  If you’re selling unscented soaps, your consumer is getting more specific – Google loves specific.  Now, if you’re selling ecofriendly unscented soaps, the person searching has probably narrowed down their results considerably and knows exactly what they want, how it should be and only lacks knowledge of who you are, personally.  Hummingbird exemplifies this situation.

Improving our search results means true businesses, like yours, are being seen as they should be.  Weeding out spam, irrelevancy and black hat practitioners isn’t any different than what your local police attempt to do each day – sure, sometimes their tactics aren’t pretty or ethical, yet for the most part, not many people bitch about their algorithm, do they?

In Closing: You’re not Prey…

Your parents rarely punished you for doing something right.  Google will never punish the search marketer for working hard – and ethically – to increase search positions for clientele.  I’ve preached this before, and I’ll state this again: those that wish to learn how to rank their websites in the top positions of Google – without any effort – should research nearly any word known to man and see why Wikipedia ranks #1 for nearly all of them.  I just searched ‘spork’ – Wikipedia is, of course, #1.

Internal linking, hero pages, useful content and plenty of viable references carefully placed into each article will definitely do the trick.  The Hummingbird update didn’t steal your soul – but it may’ve saved your tail.