Are Hummingbird and Pigeon Algorithms Friends or Foes?

Remember hummingbird? the algorithm that changed the way Google works till then. Hummingbird works unlike penguin and panda, the most frightening search engine algorithms for SEO blogger on the Blogosphere. The algorithm was introduced a year ago and have shown 90% effect on the queries like no other algorithm that was introduced by Google till then.

The inspiration for hummingbird was the increase of voice searches on the search engine. The voice searches have actually been so natural than being like searching with keywords. Google noticed the people using voice search as natural as ‘where is XYZ hospital?” and “how to reach park station?” rather than the conventional typing of “XYZ hospital in Townsville” and “route to park station”. Later worked out to release hummingbird last year.

Wait! I can smell you wondering why am I talking about this now.

Because I respect hummingbird as it increased my blog’s page rank as well as my authority on it. Hold on! respect’s apart, I sense a connection between the youngest local search algorithm, the pigeon and this hummingbird.

The pigeon was released to make local listings more accurate and reachable. We’ve already discussed how pigeon works in the previous articles. Google tried to manage a good balance between the local reach and the web reputation of the listings.

Why do I think they are connected?

Though pigeon looks bigger than the hummingbird, the algorithm that had affected the major percent of queries is the hummingbird only. One can optimize their website to survive pigeon in local listings but one cannot revamp their whole content on the website to survive the hummingbird algorithm.

As discussed above, the hummingbird was inspired by the increase in the volume of voice searches. As we have seen earlier, a voice search would be like “Ok Google! show me the list of restaurants in this area” rather than being like “Ok Google! restaurants-station road-Mumbai city”. So as to serve the user with most accurate information, pigeon comes to use with a refined list of local listings to hummingbird algorithm. Hence, in this point of view, they look like thickly attached to each other. Let’s also talk about the other perspective too.

Let us suppose I wanted to search online businesses which don’t have a physical address and doesn’t need one also. In case if I searched for a business like this “Ok Google! show me the best blogging services online” and it shows up the results that are optimized to local listings. Would I be served with the best one in the top of the better-optimized one?

What do you think? Are hummingbird and pigeon algorithms are on the same end or opposite one? Share your opinions freely.