BERT, Google's new algorithm

In recent weeks there has been a lot of talk about BERT, Google's new algorithm. It is currently being implemented for inquiries in English and will gradually expand to the rest of the world.

But what is BERT?

Google BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is one of the major updates in recent years in terms of SEO.

What this new algorithm is going to do is help to better understand and analyze the nuances and context of words in the searches carried out by users thanks to Artificial Intelligence. In this case, the content of a site will not be analyzed, but rather what the user is looking for.

But... is BERT really useful for users?

Google has carried out a large amount of tests, such as those shown below.

BERT example 1:

The first example shown by Google on its blog refers to this particular search “2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa”. In Spanish it would be “2019 Brazilian traveler to the USA needs a visa”. In this sentence, prepositions are important in order to understand the meaning. This is a Brazilian who travels to the United States and not the other way around. Los algorithms prior to BERT did not provide optimal results because they understood that they were people from the United States who were traveling to Brazil. The new BERT algorithm will give greater importance to prepositions and pronouns.

BERT Example 2:

When the user did the following search for “do estheticians stand a lot at work” (“Do beauticians work a lot?) Google used to relate it to other concepts. For example, their system used to think that “stand” was the same as “stand-alone”.

Example BERT 3:

In this example, we can see that from the following search for “math practice books for adults” (math workbooks for adults), the result that BERT offers is better than the one shown before.

Google comments that 1 in 10 results will be affected by the BERT algorithm, this means that 10% of all queries will be affected by this new update.

So far, at Novicell we haven't noticed any real visual impact, but we do believe that BERT will help Google's search engine better analyze natural language. Sometimes, what users type is very difficult for the search engine to decipher and the results it offers are not in line with those being searched, since Google did not know how to interpret searches very well.

We recommend that you add a note today to Google Analytics to check if your traffic changes from now on, so you can have more control over your website's analytics.

In the end, the best thing to do is not do anything special for BERT, but make it unique for your users, write for people and not for algorithms. If the content is of quality and you have The SEO of the site worked correctly, you'll get a good position in Google.

How can we help you?

If you need more information, do not hesitate to contact get in touch with us.