Google can answer just about any question you throw at it; however, there is one aspect that it often lacks the depth and knowledge to understand, and that is the nuances of language. When searching for answers online, Google itself wants to get you to the correct information in the shortest amount of time but in the past, by doing so, it would misinterpret certain context and provide irrelevant results. Take for example context queues – in the English language, certain words have multiple meanings, but Google would simply provide answers relevant to the most popular search term meaning. With the new BERT algorithm, Google will have a better understanding of the nuance and context of words.
What is BERT?
BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers and is a learning algorithm to help Google understand what words in a sentence mean; this also relates to conversational queries with prepositions that affect the meaning of the search. Typically, Google analysis the individual words within a search, however, with this new update it will instead look at the entire phrase to give more accurate results. Although ranking will still be very much dependent on the quality of content on your particular page, this update itself analyzes the search query, not the web page.
What Does This Google Algorithm Change Mean For You?
As previously mentioned, this update is not meant to penalize anyone, but rather to give users clearer results. Just as you normally do, continue to update your website regularly and provide potential customers and clients with clear and concise answers. Like most updates, this one will most likely be revised and tweaked once results begin to roll in, so don’t make any significant changes until you find out exactly what it means for your site.
Although Google updates can often be scary, take a moment to appreciate that this update is a step in the right direction and is just the very beginning of a long process to help Google better understand such queries. As experts in the field, you can be confident that ApartmentSEO® is on top of this update and is continuing to help keep you are your business at the top of the search results.
