Back in October, Google rolled out the big update called BERT for the English-speaking world. Last week, it was also rolled out for almost all other languages, including German. How relevant is it now that it's on our doorstep? Our colleagues at Seobility have taken a closer look at the update and the latest information about it. According to Google, around 10% of all search queries are affected by this update.
At first glance, this sounds like a small number of search queries, but when you consider that 15% of all search queries are asked for the first time, the ratio looks different again. With Google's new NLP technology, which stands for "Natural Language Processing", the search engine should now be able to understand human language even more precisely. This new update should primarily benefit long search queries, which usually means search queries that refer to a specific thing compared to generic search queries with one or two words. The aim was not to re-evaluate websites, but to better understand each individual search query and the respective intention of the person asking the query .
New markup for availability in shops in image search
Previously, certain information could be stored using rcs data austria markup codes to make it easier for Google to understand. This previously worked using schema markup and can also be checked using Google's markup testing tool. Now it is also possible for this additional information to show the availability of products in image search. When you click on the corresponding image, further information such as price and star ratings appear. This also makes image search appear as a more attractive shopping option
In the webmaster hangout on December 10th, the question arose as to what happens if a page has a canonical tag on another website that contains a "noindex". John Müller's answer to this is that deindexing is not unlikely. Therefore, you should always pay attention to which commands you use .
A case study, which is also explained by SEO-Südwest, shows what happens when a shop simply removes informative content such as blogs and guides and the existing links are redirected to the homepage. In this case, according to a Twitter user, the rankings of all ranking pages have dropped. This includes the pages that are still online. This could indicate that the drop in ranking of individual subpages can also influence the ranking of other subpages. Of course, it is not just the rankings that are relevant, but also the added value for users that is lost when the subpages are removed .