By now lots of has been said about the new Google Hummingbird update. In many ways statements floating around on the internet are confusing.
Every time a new announced update takes place a huge flurry of buzz and panic takes over for Internet Marketers about what this means to them and their business. Myself I prefer to wait and see the dust settle down before taking any action.
At the moment the SEO gods are pretty much in agreement this was really not a algorithmic update for ranking but a tweak in understanding queries by users for finding content that best matches their query. A way to improve showing results not just for the keywords but a way to show search results that best addresses the questions users of search use to find what they are looking for.
By understanding users intent when searching the results offered become more relevant.
Every year Google is diving deeper and deeper in evolving its natural language recognition and Hummingbird addresses many of the ambiguous searches only relying on synonyms in their past infrastructural updates recognizing this was not a perfect solution for serving relevant updates.
A good very detailed article is at MOZ http://moz.com/blog/hummingbird-unleashed explaining all the gory details if you wish to know more.
For now you don’t have to rush out and make any changes to your web pages if your providing themed and well thought out content to serve visitors and not search engines.
Long tail search is still the way to go and provide content relative to these keywords in search.
No need to panic with this update, linking and its previous updates are the most important updates that need to be address.
If your mass commenting for backlinking to unrelated blogs you need to rethink your backlinking strategies on two fronts.
First the blog owner more than likely will just not approve your comments if not related to the blog content (when will you spammers get this point) or Google will notice your leaving a backlink for shoes on a guinea pig site at least find blogs related to your backlinks. Links are no longer just links if your going to succeed in internet marketing.
By linking to themed sites you are going to realize you don’t need that many links to rank so stop spamming it works less and less.
To Your Success
Ed