Google started with a very simple promise: “Give us your search query, and we’ll match it to keyword stings within web documents in our index”.
Back then, search engine optimization was mostly about identifying those popular search queries and repeating them throughout your web pages for Google to be able to match them when that query is searched.
Obviously, this method resulted in two main problems:
- It ignored the context (of the query and in the document) so searchers were often served irrelevant results
- It offered too many opportunities to manipulate the relevancy signal by adding searchable queries within an irrelevant document
Google understood both of those weaknesses of that old-school method, so they worked hard to change the algorithm at its core, i.e. to teach the machine to understand queries like humans do.
Two most important query processing algorithms: Hummingbird and BERT
There must have been a lot of behind-the-scenes updates, tweaks and experiments but the two Google chose to announce and explain were Hummingbird and BERT.
Hummingbird
Google Hummingbird was announced back in 2013 and few SEOs grasped its significance back then, because the visible impact on search rankings was minimal.
Yet, it was more than a tweak to the algorithm.
Search Engine Land compares it to changing the car engine of an old car.
Instead of targeting one specific signal (links, content, etc.), Google announced changing the way they treated search queries, i.e. instead of taking a...
Read Full Story: https://www.minttwist.com/blog/googles-query-processing-algorithms-and-what-they-mean-for-your-seo-strategy/
Your content is great. However, if any of the content contained herein violates any rights of yours, including those of copyright, please contact us immediately by e-mail at media[@]kissrpr.com.
