What You Need to Know About Google BERT!

How BERT Can Impact Your SEO Score

Google regularly unleashes new pieces of software that impact how its search engine performs. One of the most exciting, for many software engineers, is BERT. Short for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, it encompasses many different functions. Primarily, it helps search engines understand complex word searches that rely heavily on word context. For those who write SEO or have SEO involved with their website, you might wonder how BERT is going to impact your SEO score. Here’s what you need to know.

How BERT Helps Searches

Because BERT can read a search query in two different directions – as opposed to other search algorithms – it is more capable of reading and comprehending what the sentence actually reads. For example, there are many words in the English language that have two meanings. Those words can even adopt different meanings when used with other certain words.

Machines have a difficult time understanding this because they don’t always have the full context. Unidirectional search engine algorithms are only capable of reading a search query in one direction. This doesn’t allow them to comprehend context because they’re unable to refer to an earlier part of the sentence after completing the entire sentence.

BERT can. While BERT is still learning context and ambiguous words, it stands at a much greater chance of being able to accumulate answers for sentences that use natural conversational speech.

Transformers is another crucial part of BERT’s design. Transformers deal with keeping track of the ‘who’s somebody’ in conversation. When having a normal conversation with someone, you may refer to a friend of a friend. That ‘who’s somebody’ can be difficult for humans to keep track of throughout the flow of conversation. For a machine, it’s even more complex.

However, because BERT’s software revolves around keeping track of transformers, it’s better at understanding exactly what the conversation is about.

It May Impact International SEO

One benefit of BERT is that it can actually correlate certain words in a different language while compiling a search for another language. Even though BERT may not understand the foreign language, per se, its system and deep-learning allow it to make those connections.

This is great for websites that use international SEO. They can use certain keywords that will help them rank higher on sites in different countries.

SEO Overall Impact

Is BERT going to impact SEO as a whole? Yes and no. While your overall SEO score may not change drastically, the more that BERT learns, the more you’ll have to pay attention to your SEO. This is because BERT may be able to better tell if a source that you link to is relevant or not.

Because it understands context better, it may start to realize that the sites you’re using for your links are actually not relevant at all. This may mean that you just need to hone your skills in nuance SEO writing or just make sure that you’re always linking to credible sources that Google enjoys the most.

Otherwise, you shouldn’t expect BERT to impact your score too much. As the software becomes more intelligent, however, it may eventually have a larger impact on SEO scores. As such, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on how BERT develops.

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