Google Hummingbird Update As of October 10, 2013

Google Hummingbird Update As of October 9, 2013

For those of you that have a website that was currently ranking for different keywords you may have noticed a disheartening minor or major drop in ranking. Google has recently launched 2 algorithms. One is Hummingbird and the other is Penguin 2.1. Hummingbird has to do with quality fresh content detection and Penguin 2.1 has to do with spam-filtering.

The general overall pattern seems to suggest Google likes content oriented sites and sites that regularly update their website. Many of the sites which fell in rankings either lack text-based or video content or did not update the site regularly with unique offers/content. On-page search engine optimization is not just about having the right meta information any more. It seems Google is actively targeting sites which do not update their on-page content since Hummingbird is designed to look for the content originator. This means on page schema coding is more important than ever!

Me and my team do differing amounts of link building from different networks and record them just to see the effect it has every time an update gets rolled out. After careful consideration, I decided to discontinue the links from some of our partner networks and invest more on custom built blogs or blogs with high Google authority.

My team and I just made a major change to how the links are distributed during the syndication process. Instead of adding 4 links on some of the article pages with differing anchor tags, we have limited it to 2. We are making all ‘click here’ anchor tags as no follow links. Due to this process, you may see some link loss over time. We do strongly believe this process will help everyone in the long run. We’ve also decided to include more co-citations in the articles we create to help with the new algorithm. What is co-citation? Read here for more.

What I am also seeing is irregular patterns which do not single out any one single factor. Some webpages and sites just seem to have randomly lost rankings while others gained traction from the same domain.

We are fighting an uphill battle since we just never know what Google will do next. There are some reports that Google will de-rank a site if almost no one clicks on the site while it stays on page 1 even though you are doing everything correctly SEO wise. All we can do now is constantly make an educated guess and deal with it. I highly recommend regularly updating your websites and adding a blog to your site and/or post articles on other sites as a guest blogger. Thus, our focus at reelWebDesign.com will be starting to go deeper into the realm of content marketing as this is where Google is headed.
For current clients I am disappointed just as much as you are as we are at a time of such great change in SEO prompted by Google. However, if we work together we can prevail, we’ll just need to cooperate with this giant that controls the Internet. Content marketing seems like the most fool proof way of getting your website ranked and to add consistent traffic for the long term. For more information and sample content marketing packages click here.