As humans, we are creatures of habit, and as such, it can be hard to accept change. While we may love site updates and software improvements, they can also be overwhelming and confusing. Let’s face it. There’s nothing more frustrating than figuring a program or service out, only to have it change the next day.
Google Ads recently made a change in its performance, and if you are a user, we’re sure that you saw the notice of the update. Maybe you were left scratching your head and wondering just what the changes are that Google Ads made, and how they are going to affect you.
Well, there are a few changes, but the biggest one is that they are now explaining the changes. As a user, you will not only be able to see the updates that Google Ads is making, but they will allow you to explore why they have made the changes and how they will benefit you.
Another significant addition is Gallery Ads, which makes it easier for users to promote products and services in news feeds with a bright collage of images.
Other new services include things like optimization score that now includes display campaigns, new multiple plans, and plan sharing in Keyword Planner, improvements in Smart Bidding, new extensions for YouTube, responsive ads (that are available to all advertisers), and much more.
Basically, to simplify it, Google Ads just added a ton of features that are going to help you to improve your business.
So, this is great. Google Ads just added all these snazzy new updates, and they are going to help you run a better business. But how do they exactly help?
If you’ve been following along, you’ll see that most of the updates have one common trend-they are analyzing data for you, instead of you having to do the work yourself.
Okay. Now we are getting somewhere.
Google Ads is making it easier for you to launch campaigns, and keep your information organized, while they do the work of sorting your information, and then give you detailed reports that enable you to know just how well you are doing.
They are even making it easier, and not only showing you the results but explaining what those results mean. You no longer have to worry about analyzing your data to improve your campaigns, because Google Ads is going to do it for you!
This is a lot to take in. Even though you might understand now what these updates are for, and how they will benefit you, you may still not know exactly how to use all this info. There’s nothing to worry about. There are companies, such as Key Medium and Running SEO, that do just that. They help you to analyze your marketing strategies and understand Google’s data so that you don’t miss out on any of the important services that Google has to offer. You want to make sure that you are getting the most out of Google’s services so that your business cannot only grow but thrive, and that’s just what Key Medium and Running SEO can do for you!
BERT. It stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. It’s Google’s newest algorithmic update, and it’s a large update that will impact around 10% of queries, as well as featured bits and organic rankings.
Essentially, what BERT does is help Google better comprehend natural language. It is also a research paper and machine learning natural language processing framework, that has caused search activity to skyrocket.
The best way to understand BERT is to understand the way that computers have had difficulty understanding language in the past. Until natural language processing came around, computers were mainly able to store text and receive the entered text.
The advent of natural language processing made it possible for researchers to develop things such as named entity recognition, classification, sentiment analysis, and question and answering, which made it possible to solve for specific types of language understanding.
Natural Learning Process models were individual tools, each with their own specific, expert task. However, BERT has revolutionized the NLP model by combining and streamlining 11 of the top functions of NLPs, allowing for one tool instead of eleven.
BERT has made strides in natural language understanding, essentially changing natural learning processing forever. Machine learning communities anticipate BERT relieving the huge burden that has accompanied their ability to perform research in natural language, as it has been pre-trained on the entire English Wikipedia of 2,500,000 words.
There are a number of different BERT versions out there, and it is expected that BERT will continue to progress. BERT began when Google took text from Wikipedia, combined with loads of money, computational power, and used an unsupervised neural network for training all of Wikipedia’s text to understand language and context.
They were able to train BERT to take any length of text and transcribe it into a vector, which is a fixed string of numbers, making it translatable to a machine. BERT looks at the words before and after a masked, or hidden, word, in order to predict what the hidden word is.
By performing this function repeatedly, BERT becomes proficient in predicting masked words, as well as in performing 11 of the most common tasks of the natural language process.
BERT is an incredible solution for companies because it opens their machines up to greater efficiency and accuracy in understanding the things that humans, as well as machines, haven’t yet been able to understand.
Every company has to work with millions of words on a daily basis, many of them difficult to deal with due to being ambiguous, polysemous, and synonymous. BERT is able to solve the difficult sentences and phrases that are a combination of numerous multi-faceted words.
Due to the fact that many words have tons of meanings, search engines and machines have thus far had difficulty determining the proper use of the word in context. And the longer a sentence or phrase is, the more difficult it becomes. BERT provides a solution for this problem, helping search engines to fill in the gaps and determine the proper message, by learning how to provide context.
BERT provides solutions by helping Google to better understand the human language, making an incredible difference in how Google interprets queries, as well as impacting voice search and SEO.
With the certain progression and updates of BERT, users can rest assured that Key Medium and the Running SEO team will continuously keep their websites prepared for updates, allowing it to function seamlessly. Every change will be put into place without users needing to do a thing, allowing their machines and processes to flow without pause.
Many think that BERT is a revolutionary update, bringing business into the next phase of technological prowess. While that very well may be the case, only time will tell.
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It’s no secret that many of us relying on reviews found online to make a decision about a company. Something so simple as a quick Google search can pull up a multitude of information, including reviews, about a business.
Now, as much as reviews can be helpful, they can also be manipulated; businesses can post their own positive reviews about their companies to encourage a potential buyer to make a sale.
Google has recently announced some changes that are being made to review rich results that will intentionally block (or not display) pages that are “flagged” for containing reviews written by themselves.
How are “fake” reviews being monitored?
They are doing this by focusing on schema type (codes). Schema markup is code that you embed on your website to help the search engines turn up better results for your users. Google is limiting the schema types that may draw up review rich results when searched.
According to Google, “Reviews that can be perceived as “self-serving” aren't in the best interest of users. We call reviews “self-serving” when a review about entity A is placed on the website of entity A - either directly in their markup or via an embedded 3rd party widget. That’s why, with this change, we’re not going to display review rich results anymore for the schema types LocalBusiness and Organization (and their subtypes) in cases when the entity being reviewed controls the reviews themselves.”
To simplify this, if a review is flagged on a business’s site that they have either left by themselves or embedded on their website by the use of a third-party widget, then it is considered self-serving, and therefore doesn't contain helpful information for reviewers.
So, Google will not be showing the results for the LocalBusiness and Organization schema types, that are flagged as embedded on the business's own site.
Now, while this is removing many “fake” reviews, it is also helping remove “skewed” results. While they may have a great product, if a company themselves is reviewing it, or promoting the review, then it means that the review is sure to be in their favor, and therefore not considered accurate or reliable.
What does this mean?
This update causes no inconvenience to website owners, but will significantly improve the review experience for users. Allowing them to trust reviews with confidence.
If you plan on continuing to use Google search as an organic method to boost your website traffic than we would recommend that you carefully review Google’s new policy and make any necessary changes not to have your content blocked from search results.
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