SEO News You Can Use: All You Need to Know About the Google BERT Update

By now, you’ve probably read quite a bit about Google’s latest core algorithm update named Google BERT. But you likely still have a lot of questions about the recent update and how it might affect your SEO performance.

Well, good news. Search Engine Land’s Dawn Anderson just published an in-depth overview of Google BERT that fills you in on the backstory of how BERT can to life. She does a good job of describing the evolution of BERT from the very beginning and how the algorithm works to improve human language understanding. The nuances are fascinating.

BERT is a big deal. Per Google, it’s the largest change to its search system since the introduction of RankBrain almost five years ago. So, you should take it very seriously and learn as much about it as you possibly can.

Search Engine Land also provides a more high-level report about Google BERT for those of you not looking to pull up a chair and inhale the deep-dive from Anderson.

More SEO News You Can Use

Google Unveils Page Speed Report in Search Console: Finally, after about nine months of waiting, Google has launched its new page speed report in Google Search Console. It pulls data from the Chrome User Experience Report and groups URLs into one of three categories: Fast, Moderate or Slow. Also, it identifies the issues causing the slowdowns and more.

Google Webmaster Weighs in on Blocking Robots.txt Files from being Indexed: Google webmaster John Mueller recently tweeted some wisdom about how to block robots.txt and sitemap files from being indexed in the search results. Robots.txt can be indeded like other URLs, and Mueller said the x-robots-tag HTTP header can be used to block robots.txt indexing.

Bing Announces Link Penalties: Search engine Bing has announced new link penalties focused on private blog networks, subdomain leasing and manipulative cross-site linking.

Google Webmaster Conference Update: Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz fills us in on the Google Webmaster Conference event last week in California. Schwartz does a nice job of rounding up the highlights from the conference in one post here that hits on updates about structured data, duplicate content, emoji searches, GoogleBot and website crawling tips and more.

University of Arizona Understands Importance of SEO: The University of Arizona recently changed its abbreviation from “UA” to “UArizona” to boost its SEO traction. Arizona was appearing below some heavy-hitters in search queries for “UA” — including Under Armour, United Airlines and the University of Alabama — and has now done something about it.

Editor’s Note: “SEO News You Can Use” is a weekly blog post posted every Monday morning only on SEOblog.com, rounding up all the top SEO news from around the world. Our goal is to make SEOblog.com a one-stop shop for everyone looking for SEO news, education and for hiring an SEO expert with our comprehensive SEO agency directory.