Google BERT: A massive update to Google’s algorithm

Every year, Google announces major updates to its algorithm. You’ve probably heard of Penguin or Panda, which are designed specifically to improve search quality.

A few weeks ago, Google announced that it had rolled out an update, and a massive one at that, called BERT.

Of course, every algorithm update will shift the rankings of many sites. Some will see their traffic drop, while others will gain audience.

1 in 10 searches will be affected by this latest update

BERT, which stands for “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers,” is billed as one of the major updates that will allow Google to break down the importance of each word in a query in order to infer the user’s intent and then offer the best possible result.

In a dedicated article on the BERT update, Google gave several examples of queries and BERT’s impact on the results.

For example, for the query “2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa,” the word “to” and its relationship to the other words in the query are particularly important for understanding the meaning. It’s about a Brazilian travelling to the United States, not the other way around. Previously, the algorithm didn’t understand the importance of this connection and returned results about U.S. citizens travelling to Brazil. With BERT, the algorithm can grasp this nuance and know that the word “to” matters a lot here, so that Google can provide a much more relevant result for this query.

Thanks to BERT, Google infers that the user intends to travel to the United States soon, and instead suggests the official website of the U.S. Embassy, which answers the user’s question while also letting them go further and apply for a visa.

Conclusion

Google says that, fundamentally, there’s nothing website publishers need to do to better meet BERT’s requirements. But as experts in healthcare marketing and organic search, we believe this change will favour sites with quality content that gives users the highest-quality answers possible.

If you think your site has been affected by the latest Google update, our experts in organic search can tell you more. Contact us!