Google BERT Update and How it May Affect Your Website’s SEO

No matter what queries we have in life we rush to ask Google about it, its because as they say, ‘Google knows everything’! To fulfil our expectations Google not just keeps bringing up new algorithm updates but tries to improve search results as much as possible.
People often tend to formulate queries in most natural ways without thinking that how google might perceive it while fetching for results. Prior to this, Google used to analyse keywords to generate as many results as possible without analysis the actual context of it. For instance, if your query ‘can anyone have a fox’ had the word ‘fox’ in it Google may have fetched for results related to ‘fox’ only without analysing the question or its context. But now after the BERT update, things have changed.

What is the new Google BERT update?

BERT refers to Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, this technology allows anyone to program their customised question-answering system. Google had been trying hard to make search results as precise as possible and this advancement is much of a success! The biggest search update in past five years that is now to change the shape of search fetched results. Google is using the BERT technology with assistance of the latest super computers known as Cloud TPUs to avoid any glitches and maximise performance results.
With the Google BERT update, Google will now understand the context of user generated queries rather than just the keywords. Which means keywords will now be analysed with the help of prepositions accompanying them as well as other words in a query to understand the query’s context. To the query ‘can anyone have a fox’ Google shows ‘can you keep a fox as pet’ as the top-ranking result. The update is now live, and results are visible!

Does BERT support all languages?

Currently Google BERT update has been launched for English whereas Google plans to bring such updates for other languages very soon. The transition is gradual as these BERT systems are capable of learning from one language (English) and applying to others.

How might BERT update affect a website’s SEO?

Lately Google has not given out any remarks over whether this update will affect any website’s leads. However, the focus has primarily been over improving search results for users. It is assumed that long-tailed keywords which were considered to bring in poor lead might now help in improving results. Not just this but a website with strong well written content will do wonders as compared to one with a lot of loopholes.
This is all that we have about the Google BERT update till now, watch out this space for more updates! Any queries? Feel free to comment below…