Last week, SEO experts and content marketers were up in arms over BERT.
Not Ernie’s best mate, rather the BERT algorithm (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). Search Engine Marketing Journal described BERT as a deep learning algorithm related to natural language processing. It helps a machine to understand what words in a sentence mean, but with all the nuances of context.
So, what does this mean for you?
The New York Times have indicated that since the algorithm their organic traffic has decreased. But why? Well, it all comes down to context. And to us, that’s a good thing.
Search Engine Marketing Land explains it perfectly with the below search term example.
The phrase was “how to catch a cow fishing?”
In New England, the word “cow” in the context of fishing means a large striped bass.
A striped bass is a popular saltwater game fish that millions of anglers fish for on the Atlantic coast.
So earlier this month, during the course of research for a PubCon Vegas presentation, I typed the phrase, “how to catch a cow fishing” and Google provided results related to livestock, to cows.
Today, October 25, 2019 the same query results in search results that are full of striped bass and fishing related results.
The BERT algorithm appeared to have understood the context of the word “fishing” as important and changed the search results to focus on fishing related web pages.
Mind blown?
Read the full article here.
Pinterest gets a fresh look
Their updated look makes Pinterest even more visual, with personalised recommendations and reduced space around Pins to celebrate the content.
Pinterest summarised the recent changes:
- Search is now in a main navigation bar where you can access personalized and trending searches with the swipe of your thumb
- The following tab can now be found at the top of home feed, where you can find new ideas from the people you follow, in chronological order
- Ideas for your most recently engaged boards appear at the top of home feed so you can jump into recommended Pins for the projects and ideas that are top of mind, and save with one tap
- An updated Profile and board view make it easier for you to find the Pins you’ve saved
Instagram tests new Story feature
Instagram is testing out a new option which would enable users to remove their Stories content from both Instagram and Facebook in one action. Very handy, for cross channel consistency! As reported by @wongmjane
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Image source: @SesameStreet
