The Rankbrain, Hummingbird, and Search Engine Optimization Fusion

Connectica • February 17, 2017 • SEO

Read Time: 3 minutes

Hummingbird, Rankbrain and Their SEO Affect

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) improves the traffic a site receives from search engines by improving the internal and external aspects of a website. It is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine. Therefore, SEO is all about algorithms and two key algorithm’s from Google are Rankbrain and Hummingbird.

Hummingbird
Google’s revamped version of their search algorithm is called Hummingbird. It is Google’s memory and it reads the pages and schema of webpages to make an entity base. Hummingbird is the overall search algorithm of Google and is made up of parts. It can be likened to a car which has an engine comprising of various parts such as a radiator and oil filter. In the same way as a car engine has these parts, Hummingbird encompasses various parts, with RankBrain being one of the newest. Hummingbird works to understand the semantics of a user’s search, understanding what they actually mean based on their search query. Therefore, Rankbrain is the thinking and Hummingbird is the memory. Hummingbird pays 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. This is known as semantic search. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.

Rankbrain
Rankbrain is Google’s new algorthim. It is an artificial intelligence computer system developed using machine learning. Rankbrain watches for what users click and search for in order to make the best educated guess about what the individual is looking for. It helps Google process and answer unfamiliar, unique and original queries. Artificial Intelligence is therefore the process where a computer system can infer what the answer to a question is, using pattern recognition and making connections. It involves teaching a machine to think as a human being and to draw knowledge both from things it already knows and from human input and programming. Essentially, Rankbrain reads between the lines of users queries and tries to understand what the meaning behind words is.

Rankbrain and Hummingbird’s affect on SEO
In short, RankBrain is a machine learning algorithm that works in conjunction with the Hummingbird update to give better search results for user queries. Rankbrain takes semantic search one step further than Hummingbird and analyzes ambiguous, unclear, or otherwise indecipherable semantic user queries, learning from the experience, and applying that experience to future, similar queries. It is an impressive and significant addition to Google’s algorithm, but it isn’t going to revolutionize the world of SEO the way algorithm updates like Panda and Penguin have. RankBrain is more focused on analyzing and mapping out user queries than it is sorting out sites for potential rank.

There may be some things in RankBrain which will affect the SEO. For example: keywords used. When a keyword is defined, you need to ensure that the customer is using a similar keyword for their search result. If the keywords defined are not words that are likely to be used by the customers, then the whole content of the site will be irrelevant. RankBrain applies meaning to the concepts and terms that Google does not already have context for, thereby moving towards more natural language usage than entirely depending on the keywords used. Therefore, the content being created needs to be relevant to what users are searching for, because in the near future, there should not be much difference in how users read websites and how Google reads it.

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