Bert is a name that is being thrown around in the online marketing world at the moment. Bert is no one special, but the impact that Bert has is substantial.

Bert, or BERT, is Google’s latest algorithm change. It is Google’s latest and biggest change to is algorithm since the company launched RankBrain around five years ago.

Currently, Google states that BERT will impact 1 in 10, or 10%, of all search queries made on its platform.

What is BERT?

Bert is all about English language queries, Google’s neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training.

As a result, BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.

In English

Essentially, BERT helps computers understand languages. In this case the English language, more like humans do.

It allows computers to better understand the nuances and context of words in searches and better match the search query made to a useful result.

The Impact of BERT

Google has made clear that you can’t really optimise for RankBrain and as a result, you cannot really optimise for BERT.

All you can do is continue to create content that is useful and relevant for its intended audience. The introduction of BERT is Google simply increasing the chances that your page is shown when users use search terms which previously puzzled the algorithm.

BERT is a positive change to Google’s search algorithms and should assist individuals in seeing more useful search results, and give websites more chances of appearing for said search results.

Published: 8th Nov 2019

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