Google: There Is Nothing To Optimize For With BERT

On Friday, Google said it launched the biggest change it made to search within Google in the past five years by releasing BERT. And as expected, Google said that you cannot optimize for BERT, just like you can’t optimize for RankBrain.

Danny Sullivan from Google said on Twitter this morning “There’s nothing to optimize for with BERT, nor anything for anyone to be rethinking.” This is how Google understands queries and content, nothing really specific to you – Google said. Danny added “The fundamentals of us seeking to reward great content remain unchanged.”

Here is the tweet:

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.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 28, 2019

He then went on a few more tweets:

My answer was that BERT doesn’t change the fundamentals of what we’ve long said: write content for users.

You or anyone working with clients have long been able to say this is what we say.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 28, 2019

To be even more specific, the blog post explains that BERT is used for general ranking now in US English. We don’t have a timeline for later releases. For featured snippets, it’s live for any language that has these (there are nearly 25 of these supported).

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 28, 2019

So do you sit back and do nothing if your rankings changed due to BERT? Did your rankings even change after the BERT release? Google did say this impacts 10% of queries…

Forum discussion at Twitter.