October 25, 2019

Google Announced The BERT Algorithm Update

What is the BERT algorithm?

The BERT algorithm is short for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. BERT is a deep learning algorithm focused on natural language processing. 

BERT rolled out this week for the English language and will expand to other languages in the future.

Why is it important?

BERT helps Google better understand the nuances and context of the words in search queries to better match search results. With BERT, Google is able to understand and analyze search queries.

For example: “2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa”

Before this update, Google would not understand the importance of the word “to” and its relationship to the neighboring words and would simply return search results about U.S. citizens traveling to Brazil. With BERT, Google is now able to understand the context and get search results that are more relevant to the query.

Do I need to do anything?

This update means Google is getting better at understanding natural language. So, just keep writing meaningful, relevant content for users, like you always do.

It is also recommended to keep an eye on search results for any changes in the next week and see how much your site was impacted by this change. If you notice that some of your pages were impacted by this algorithm update, dive deeper into the content on those pages in conjunction with the search query being used. You may notice that the content on the page was not helpful or useful with the query being searched.