Google has announced the successor to RankBrain, which they have named BERT is rolling out now and will affect 1 in 10 search queries. BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.
According to digital marketing lecturer Dawn Anderson, “BERT and family improve the state of the art on 11 natural language processing tasks. Even beating human understanding since linguists will argue for hours over the part of speech a single word is.
“But what if the focus of a page is very weak? Even humans sometimes will be like ‘what’s your point?’ when we hear something.
And pronouns have been very problematic historically but BERT helps with this quite a bit. Context is improved because of the bi-directional nature of BERT.”
Traditionally, words like “to” and “no” have been problematic for Google. BERT is now able to understand the context and relationship of these words.
Search Engine Land gives this explanation, “Here is an example of Google showing a more relevant featured snippet for the query ‘Parking on a hill with no curb’. In the past, a query like this would confuse Google’s systems. Google said, “We placed too much importance on the word ‘curb’ and ignored the word ‘no’, not understanding how critical that word was to appropriately responding to this query. So we’d return results for parking on a hill with a curb.”
Make no mistake, BERT is a big algorithm change. SEO’s are already seeing changes in the SERPs for some queries. Take heart though as the impact is mostly on long-tail queries as BERT is trying to make sense of the relationship of words to each other.
The advice that one should write content for users and not for search engines is even more evident now that Google with its newest machine learning system also is moving closer to natural speech than ever before.
So, what is after BERT? Hmnn, one wonders if Ernie will be next. 🙂
Citations
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-bert-update/332161/
https://twitter.com/dawnieando
https://searchengineland.com/why-you-may-not-have-noticed-the-google-bert-update-324103
