Google's new Hummingbird algorithm...shall we dance?

Forget about Penguin, Panda, Caffeine and all other tweaks to the 200+ ranking factors Google used in it's search results algorithms...they are all dead. Google announced that it had quietly rolled out Hummingbird, a complete redesign of its core ranking algorithm, affirming what SEOs had already seen...shifts in search results across many categories.

Google typically has not revealed much about Hummingbird, except to say it was more adept at teasing out the meaning of entire sentences in search queries, instead of just splitting them into keywords and weighting each word to provide search results. Much in the way Apple's Siri has attempted to interpret spoken commands, Hummingbird will attempt to contextualize keywords within a complete sentence, to better estimate intent. The result should be to find specific pages within a website instead of retargeting a website's home page in the results. The interim result is the infuriating shuffling of page rankings that is referred to as the "Google Dance."

While SEOs will be busy for the next couple of months measuring changes in SERPs and trying to interpret the weighting of various ranking factors, the core message is the same: focus on developing unique and relevant content, which will always be well-ranked no matter the algorithm.