Google has sent waves across the SEO industry by announcing a bunch of exciting roll outs.
Although many are nervous about the game-changing because of fundamental alterations by Google, others are thrilled at the new opportunities that will be made available.
Keyword Reporting
As a move to bring extra protection to internet users, keyword data that was previously provided to site owners were eliminated, with all searches happening on encrypted servers. While this sounds highly alarming for those involved in SEO as well as businesses whose life-spans are dictated by keyword rankings, the truth is that the move brings a brand-new lease of life.
This will now force digital marketers to make more of an effort with content and social media, Instead of relying on keywords. High-quality content and increased social media engagement will be the name of the game.
Hummingbird
This is a major change and the result of 15 years of work and research, yet Google didn’t make too much noise about it. The Hummingbird update has affected 90 per cent of searches worldwide, so that more complex queries can be understood. It seems like Google has now grown up: the update
will make searching far more sophisticated, by understanding the meaning of questions, combining vocabulary and grammar and so on.
Hashtag Searches
Keywords seem to have been replaced by hashtags, which Google have now focused their attention on. These are now seen as providing value-added results in searches. Apparently, not only will users be given standard search results for their query, they will also be given a live scrolling feed of Google+ posts with the hashtag of the query that was searched by the user, including links to said hashtag feeds on Facebook, Twitter or any other platform that makes use of them.
These three changes are going to shape the face of the internet and how searching works. Watch this space.