Missed the target?However, Pigeon didn't always land as planned. The Local SEO Update was intended to benefit small, local businesses. However, there were cases – particularly in the US – where the exact opposite was true, and small businesses suffered significant ranking losses . SEO-Südwest reported in October 2014 on the results of a study on the Pigeon Update , which examined the changes in the SERPs and the possible ranking factors. The key findings were as follows:
Strong domains and brands benefitDistance from the city nigeria cell phone number list center relevantFun fact: The update was named “Pigeon” by SearchEngineLand , not Google itself. The idea behind it: “Pigeon is the name we chose because this is a local search update, and pigeons tend to fly home.”
Hummingbird Update: Knows what you want.Search algorithm update on search intentSimilar to Caffeine , Hummingbird revolutionized the search engine when it was released in August 2013 (Google's announcement actually came a month later).
While Penguin and Panda had a drastic and direct impact on many websites, the 2013 Hummingbird update was primarily noticeable through the fine-tuning under the hood of the Google algorithm. This, too, is an innovation in the Google search algorithm.
The clear goal: to better understand search queries. Why do people search for a specific keyword, what is the underlying search intent ? What search results do they expect?