A big day, September 26, is now behind us. Wikipedia lists the number one most important anniversary, and the others are truly less important, as “1087 – William II, son of William the Conqueror, was crowned King of England.” Who, huh? Actually, the day is best remembered as the anniversary of Google’s announcement to the world about its Hummingbird filter!
Shockingly, over two years later almost no one has released software to fully address the needs of website content creators and those doing advanced, on-page Semantic SEO. I’ve developed techniques and tools, shared on this website, but they do require an SEO or content strategist “practitioner” to learn and use them. The only end to end software solution is brought to you by MarketMuse, a Boston company.
MarketMuse provides several tools that employ algorithmic logic in discovering topical gaps in website content. The easiest and quickest to use is their “Content Analyzer.” Paste a page from the web— images and all— and it will strip out non-text media. Then hit the “analyze” button and see the gaps. I did this for the Wikipedia page about President Obama. The result are as much intriguing and interesting to review as they are accurate and highly actionable if this were a website about presidents.
The first gap identified is “birth certificate.” There are conspiracy theories being promoted all over the Web, even though it’s a non-issue. Wikipedia doesn’t have it on the page, but it IS very relevant, if for no other reason than to discuss the ongoing heavy promotion of dis-information. Overall, though, the page get’s a high score with 28 of 50 related topics mentioned. Wikipedia pages are very “thorough,” so we’d expect a high rank. Also, this is a very broad topic to cover given all that’s written on the Web about the President, so any webpage would have variance when covering the top 50 most related keywords or themes to the parent theme found by MarketMuse.
The great irony of Google’s Hummingbird filter is it can be “backwards engineered” in ways the Penguin or Panda filters can’t. Hummingbird is the most complex Algorithm Google’s employed, yet there is a transparency and means to an end that’s not so simple with prior algo updates. If holistic, comprehensive, and semantically related information is what we need, we get there with MarkMuse.
