PR for People Monthly November 2013 The Entrepreneurial Mindset | Page 11

The Bird That Ate

Search Engine Optimization
by Marianne Sweeny

On September 26, Google announced its
Hummingbird update, living up to the irony of their
update naming convention, as this is no pint-sized
change. With Hummingbird, Google moved even
further from a link-based model of relevance-ranking
to the user-experience model of relevance that started
with the 2011 Panda update.
Google has always had an adversarial relationship
with the Search Engine Optimization community and
the concept of external manipulation of position, or
ranking, in search results. Evidently, no one gets to
manipulate that but Google themselves. Their Panda
update shifted focus from links to the user-experience measured by click-through (does the user select
the page from the results set), bounce rate (does the
user engage with the page or bounce back to the
result) and conversion (did the page satisfy the user’s
information need).
The Penguin update followed and brought a sense
of the Spanish Inquisition to Web search. This
algorithm delisted sites found to have too many
“spammy” links. Site owners are forced to petition
for re-inclusion, an expensive process that includes
removal of the offending links.
Hummingbird is the knockout punch. With this
update, Google is rewriting the user’s query with the
substitution of synonyms for extracted entities. Then,
both queries, the original and the revised, are submitted to the index for a result set that is a combination
of results for both.
What’s a site owner to do? Be realistic. Attaining the
top spot in search results is no good unless users go
to your site and do something. Create deep, rich content that is focused on your core product or service
offering. Have links out to contextually relevant,

authoritative resources on the Web. Become social
with a Google+ account for your website or business
that you update frequently.
SEO is not about keywords any more. It’s about concepts and their relationship to other concepts.
- Marianne Sweeny