The Latest Changes from Google

Google has been quite busy lately updating their algorithm and other features with several different changes. These changes likely affect your online presence, so we wanted to outline them to keep you updated on Google’s updates. If you have a website to promote your business, whether it is selling online or just using the website to connect online searchers to your store, then these changes at Google could be affecting you and how people searching on Google find your website, and ultimately find your business. Google is always making changes to their algorithm that affects how search results are shown, however some of the most recent changes have been pretty major ones. We will give a quick over view of the “not provided” reporting update and the Hummingbird algorithm update.

“Not Provided” Update

Some industry analysts are referring to this as a “Post Prism Update”, however that is not what Google is calling it. The “Not Provided” Update is a change not just in Google’s search results algorithm, but in the way that they are reporting in Google Analytics. Over the last few years, Google has been slowly reducing the amount of keyword data that shows up in Google Analytics reporting. Rather than webmasters and marketers being able to see what keywords are being searched by users who find their site, the stats have been increasingly showing “not provided”.

Google just recently announced that soon the “not provided” keyword statistics will soon be at 100%, meaning that webmasters and marketers will not be able to get keyword data for any organic listings. Only paid search will continue to report keyword specifics and details. Google maintains that this is strictly a move to protect users’ privacy. However, since users are not attached to their search data by name, it has been a very controversial topic. Others have speculated that this was a move by Google to prevent the NSA in the United States from accessing Google’s data. Google also maintains that this is not Prism related and that it is only for the privacy of their users. Google is quoted as saying, “We want to provide SSL protection to as many users as we can, in as many regions as we can — we added non-signed-in Chrome omnibox searches earlier this year, and more recently other users who aren’t signed in. We’re going to continue expanding our use of SSL in our services because we believe it’s a good thing for users…. The motivation here is not to drive the ads side — it’s for our search users.”

What does this mean for your business and your website? Google users worldwide are affected by this change, and even though it does not affect your ranking results, it does affect your advertising strategy when you cannot see what keywords online searchers are using to find your website. Supplementing your organic search strategy with some small paid traffic Adwords campaigns would give you a little insight into some keyword behavior, but not all of it. SearchEngineWatch also gives us some insight into strategies for businesses in a “not provided” world.

Hummingbird Update

The Hummingbird update is an algorithm update that is ongoing. Google just made a large update to this algorithm that they announced would affect over 90 per cent of searches. That basically means almost every search performed will now be using the new algorithm. Hummingbird updates make changes to Google’s Knowledge Graph, which is the intuitive search results based on inferring what the user might mean when they enter a keyword or key phrase search, the results are based on past search history and serves universal results from web, social, video, images, and Wikipedia details. When you search for something on Google, they are trying to return a variety of results based on what knowledge they have about you that will be more relevant to you. The latest Hummingbird change was just announced by Google’s SVP of Search  and coincided with their 15^th anniversary. He also outlined future changes that we should look to see with improvements in conversational search, voice search, and mobile search features all being upgraded and improved.