Hummingbird is the new Google change to the search engine rankings and results. It is not a new algorithm update (Panda or Penguin). In fact it is a new algorithm.
It gets to the point where SEO work is virtually impossible. Whilst there are still 100s of Indian companies out there offering paid links, link farming and black hat SEO techniques, in fact no-one knows anymore whether they are signing their notice of execution or a blank cheque to make huge amounts of money from being number one on Google.
Google have got smarter, cleverer, more ambitious, and, dare we say it, more greedy in its short life.
Initially it was very ethically minded, trying to avoid being a large and evil corporation and living the hippy dream of free access for all.
Now it seems to spend the majority of its time trying to work out how to make more and more money.
Hummingbird is another example.
Hummingbird is designed to let Google quickly parse entire questions and complex queries and return relevant answers, as opposed to looking at queries on a keyword-by-keyword basis.
Google says 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.
It has an ongoing strategy to become less dependent on keywords, which has major implications for SEO (ie you cant just write “window cleaners in Preston” everywhere on your website and pop up at number one.
It’s probably going to be very important to give Google as much information about your site as possible in order for the search engine to “understand” it.
Keywords are becoming less and less important to search engine ranking success.
An opinion from an expert SEO writer:
“Panda: was about Google cutting out Adsense payouts to Bloggers. It crushed almost 1million plus bloggers.
Penguin was a manual override pushing ecommerce to Amazon forcing small business to pay to rank by having to use PPC (700K ecommerce sites affected and most small businesses down 70% over the last 2 years now.
Hummingbird is about getting more business owners to have to use Google + to force others into getting on circles and groups so they can try to compete with Facebook.
Behind every Google update in the last 3 years is an evil side back side that Google does not talk about.
Google started as a company that people trusted and its motto was “Dont be Evil” —– but that motto has be crushed and replaced be greed and global control.” (http://www.webpronews.com/hummingbird-is-googles-biggest-algorithm-change-in-12-years-2013-09#oomments)