Google confirms biggest algorithm update in five years

Google has confirmed the roll out its ‘most important’ algorithm update in five years. The update is known as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers – or BERT for short – and will affect around 1 in 10 of all search queries made globally.Google says that BERT is its most notable algorithm to be introduced since the launch of RankBrain in 2014. As you may have guessed from its full moniker, BERT is a natural language processing (NLP) initiative. Simply put, it will help Google’s computers to think more like humans. The algorithm will help the machine’s to have a better grasp of human speech in particular, which means better search results for Google users. In addition to returning more relevant search results, BERT will also be used for featured snippets, in all languages.The new algorithm began rolling out this week so its influence is already being felt.

In its official announcement about BERT, Google explained why the update was needed and what it will mean for search moving forwards, saying: “ These improvements are oriented around improving language understanding, particularly for more natural language/conversational queries, as BERT is able to help Search better understand the nuance and context of words in Searches and better match those queries with helpful results. Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.” So what does BERT mean for your SEO? To understand what BERT will mean for you and your ecommerce web design’s SEO, it helps to think of BERT as a tool Google will use to help it better understand natural language. Essentially, Google wants to be able to give search users better and more relevant results and that means its computers need to understand all of the nuances of natural human speech.BERT is a step forward for search engine users because it helps Goole’s computers to better understand context and intent in a search query. So, if there is a possible double meaning to a word, BERT will look at other words used to guess which meaning the searcher actually intended.When it comes to translating this to your SEO, you’ll need to ensure that the purpose of your pages is clear. Your sentence structure should be crisp and clear and your content should have a clear focus. Context will be important. To stay on BERT’s good side, it would be well worth reviewing your web content tightening up text to add clarity and context where needed.