Search Queries

Google will try to understand the intent of a query in order to display the most accurate page in search results. For example, if they view the search query to be more transactional they will show a product page instead of an informational page. John recommends reviewing real queries that users are making and ensuring the intent is accurate for the page that is being displayed.

Google Search Engineers are able to debug individual queries and understand why pages are ranking the way they are.

BERT is being used by Google to help them to understand both user queries and the content on websites, in order to serve the most relevant results to users. John reiterated that, besides ensuring you are creating content that is easily understandable for users, there is nothing specific that needs to be done to websites to make them work better for BERT. Google are constantly expanding and testing their understanding of queries in order to apply it for different languages.

There are different algorithms running all the time to collect signals about a website’s content in order to gain a notion of the quality and relevance for individual queries. A core algorithm update will not lead to a website being completely re-evaluated but will update the scores used.

The ‘show omitted results’ link in the search results is shown when there are multiple results that would display the same snippet or preview. Google does this as it doesn’t make sense to show users the exact same snippet multiple times for different pages.

There isn’t anything specific you need to do to optimise for BERT, as this update is about Google’s algorithms understanding natural language better.

There isn’t a way to display the last updated date rather than the published date in search results. However, Google tries to work out which date would be most appropriate to display. This could also be the date when it first saw the page or when it saw the page was last updated. In a lot of cases Google will not show the date at all, as it doesn’t see this as an important thing to display.

Google will display sitelinks in search results when it makes sense for the query a user is searching for. It isn’t determined by the quality of a website.

Google Discover isn’t associated with queries as it is based on what Google thinks the user’s interests are, so to show up there you need to focus on topics that interest your users rather than keywords.

Google will test displaying sites to users in different counties to see if the content is useful for them, so data in GSC may be affected by these temporary changes. You can usually identify temporary behaviour by checking the number of impressions seen for certain pages in different countries to see if it lower than what is typically seen.