Now you can’t optimize with BERT

Hi folks, I have come up with another new article on Google update. We all love to hear what Google has updated or changed in its algorithm. Every year Google makes new changes and this year too Google has updated something for its users. Do you want to know? So, recently Google announced a significant update to how it handles search queries, called BERT. Bert? What’s the hack of this?

Before I talk about updates of Google’s BERT, first I’ll make you clear with the concept of BERT. So, let’s get started with it.

What exactly Google BERT is?

Google BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. It is a form of AI (Artificial Intelligence) that allows Google to better understand the relationships between elements of language in a search engine.

In simple words, Google now will provide you simple and more accurate, better results for more complex and more conversational long-tail search terms, like  “can you get medicine for someone’s chemist store”. BERT is a technology that helps to train the natural language processing system in order to create a state of the art question answering system.

Basically, it allows Google to read a complete sentence while looking at the individual words within that sentence and understand how those words relate to all the other words in the sentence. Earlier, Google used to read sentences on a word-by-word basis.

Let’s understand why Google released BERT           

As I already told you that BERT is all about understanding the meaning behind the content what the user is searching or looking for on Google. Let me also tell you that the aim of BERT is to predict and make contextual assumptions about the meaning behind the complex search terms.

Furthermore, concepts and context are at the heart of BERT. Now, you can see it’s an encouraging sign that Google has taken to better understand the average and less web-savvy searcher.

Can you optimize with Google BERT?

To put simply, the answer is ‘NO’. You can’t optimize with Google BERT and even you can’t optimize your website for the kinds of unpredictable and completely unique phrases or sentences that BERT is aiming to return better search results for. 

Nevertheless, you can keep continuing your work as any good SEO does, for example, creating great content for readers, and using natural language. And Google also said that you can’t optimize for BERT, same as you can’t optimize for Rank Brain (AI tool that Google uses in its search result).

Let’s read what Danny Sullivan from Google has to say on BERT Optimization. He said “There’s nothing to optimize for with BERT, nor anything for anyone to be rethinking. The fundamentals of us seeking to reward great content remain unchanged”

Some highlights on Google BERT

• Google BERT is live for US English language queries.
• It will impact featured snippets in a huge way and not just for English featured snippets but also for many different languages.
• BERT is the same as Rank Brain. It is a machine-learning algorithm whose aim is to understand queries and content on a page.
• BERT is technically a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training.
• Google says BERT is the biggest step of Google for search in the past 5 years and it will impact only 10% of search queries.
• BERT also doesn’t replace Rank Brain or other language algorithms. It can co-exist with them and used accordingly.

This concludes our Google BERT section of series. I hope through this blog, you understood everything about Google BERT and its updates. Get in touch for our next article.