Google E.A.T - How does it work?

[Dreamchaser]

Hi,

A complete newbie here. Would like to hear your view on Google E.A.T.

What would you do to address E.A.T requirements if you own multiple websites?

Do you use different personas on your about page for your various websites to hide your identity and avoid leaving trails for your competitors?

Or do you use your real identity for each of your websites?

 

[illmasterj]

I don't have an about page. Still isn't stopping growth. Links are the ultimate EAT.

 

[bernard]

I have no idea what EAT is and most people who claim to know, don't really know. Marie Haynes who is the EAT expert admits she doesn't even have a knowledge graph entry herself, so it's obviously not Google checking authors for their credentials.

What I personally think it is:

1. On page factors judged by AI
2. Links from aged authority links

As for 1. I do think like things like an author bio, about us page etc, is something that is checked for. I also believe this is some kind of multiple flag AI, that checks if a page "sort of" looks like what authority sites look ikke.

As for 2. this is what I think definitely is the most important. It's not just links, it's specifically editorially given aged authority links. What is authority links? It's probably some page rank, but if I were to make an EAT rank myself, then I would manually choose a few dozen very high trust authority sites. That would be things like Wikipedia, Mayo Clinic, Harvard University and so on. That would be the equivalent of a Page Rank 9 in the old days. Then the sites who have links from there have EAT/1-x and the links that have links from those sites have (EAT/1-x)/1-x and so on.

So what it's about is getting those second tier Edu/Gov links like back in the day and they need to age.

 

[Dreamchaser]

Thanks for the input. Appreciate it.

Do you think it will be a problem with EAT in the future if let says the about page, author bio, etc has the same author for two different websites in completely different niches?

Rather than writers who are generalists, Google may put more weight on writers who have experience in a particular niche. More like YMYL for the health and finance niche and now Google is getting stricter with the fitness and beauty niche.

What do you do with your about page if you have multiple websites? Do you use a fake persona for your about page and author bio?

 

[Zyzz]

Do you think it will be a problem with EAT in the future if let says the about page, author bio, etc has the same author for two different websites in completely different niches?

Different websites, no. Different niches, it depends. For example, a doctor can be an author on a site in the health niche and still have some articles on another site in the food niche. Unless it's a YMYL niche, it doesn't matter.

Rather than writers who are generalists, Google may put more weight on writers who have experience in a particular niche. More like YMYL for the health and finance niche and now Google is getting stricter with the fitness and beauty niche.

I don't think that has much weight. Yeah, the algorithm is getting better, however, Google is not as smart as it seems. YMYL is all about connecting the dots to see if the website or page can be trusted.

What do you do with your about page if you have multiple websites? Do you use a fake persona for your about page and author bio?

I now use fake details since I am not doing anything considered YMYL related. Fake name, AI-generated image, and the profile bio are also AI-generated, lol.

 

[Roy Cohen]

I think that EAT is more about building up trust through authority (aka links from sites that Google considers authoritative, ie: Healthline, Forbes, etc). It's too easy to game authors IMO unless Google can detect writing styles which I don't think it can.

 

[Google PE]

EAT is not a ranking factor.
EAT is a concept that describes most aspects of how the Google algorithm works.
EAT is a level of overall site quality.

 

[thisishatred]

EAT is not a ranking factor.
EAT is a concept that describes most aspects of how the Google algorithm works.
EAT is a level of overall site quality.

I always find it interesting that Google calls "EAT" a non-factor in terms of the algorithm, yet through the transitive property, if all these patents create EAT then EAT must be a factor.

Some examples:

Generating author vectors: Patent link
Speaker Identification Patent: Patent link
Website representation vectors patent: Patent link
Related Entities patent: Patent link

To quote Google: "assessing your own content in terms of E-A-T criteria may help align it conceptually with the different signals our automated systems use to rank content."

Let that sink in.

*The above references are from Bill - RIP Bill Slawski.

 

[Google PE]

Hi @thisishatred

Note (March 2020): Since we originally wrote this post, we have been occasionally asked if E-A-T is a ranking factor. Our automated systems use a mix of many different signals to rank great content. We've tried to make this mix align what human beings would agree is great content as they would assess it according to E-A-T criteria. Given this, assessing your own content in terms of E-A-T criteria may help align it conceptually with the different signals that our automated systems use to rank content.

I don't insist on anything.

In my opinion,

EAT is an evaluation model, or in other words, it is a set of criteria, as stated in the official post.
Google takes these criteria into account when developing and updating its algorithms, which in turn take ranking signals into account.
I'll give you an example. Transparency is not a ranking factor, but an acceptance criterion.

Many people think that each letter in this acronym is a separate ranking signal.

The amount of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) is very important. Please consider:
● The expertise of the creator of the MC.
● The authoritativeness of the creator of the MC, the MC itself, and the website.
● The trustworthiness of the creator of the MC, the MC itself, and the website.

The expertise. It mainly means "Focus on content" (content quality, and creator experience). If we talk about ranking signals, then these are quality assessment signals, many of which were used in the Panda algorithm.
The authoritativeness. It's mainly about backlinks (PageRank as a ranking signal).
The trustworthiness. IMHO, it is about site age, transparency, good search history (no violations, no misleading information), etc.

 

[thisishatred]

Hi @thisishatred


I don't insist on anything.

In my opinion,

EAT is an evaluation model, or in other words, it is a set of criteria, as stated in the official post.
Google takes these criteria into account when developing and updating its algorithms, which in turn take ranking signals into account.
I'll give you an example. Transparency is not a ranking factor, but an acceptance criterion.

Many people think that each letter in this acronym is a separate ranking signal.



The expertise. It mainly means "Focus on content" (content quality, and creator experience). If we talk about ranking signals, then these are quality assessment signals, many of which were used in the Panda algorithm.
The authoritativeness. It's mainly about backlinks (PageRank as a ranking signal).
The trustworthiness. IMHO, it is about site age, transparency, good search history (no violations, no misleading information), etc.

Not sure why you just gave me a mini-thesis statement, as I agreed with you - I mean even Google says "it's a non-factor."

This is my point: "yet through the transitive property"

They say it's a non-factor, yet have specific patents and in turn things baked into the algorithm to specifically target "EAT's" over-arching goals.

Hence why they said this: "assessing your own content in terms of E-A-T criteria may help align it conceptually with the different signals our automated systems use to rank content."

Many people think that each letter in this acronym is a separate ranking signal.

Again, I only provided 4 patents, there are hundreds. If you look at those patents specifically, you start to realize they target bullet-points in terms of the Rater's documents for EAT signals.

Bill Slawski was the only person that actually took the time to sit down and break down the patents into laymen terms: https://www.seobythesea.com/

 

[harrytwatter]

EAT is a PR stunt to communicate to web admins what to do to rank better without specifically telling them what to do to rank better, hence the general confusion around the specifics of the acronym.

 

[OlliK]

AFAIK EAT is a concept for humans to evaluate web-pages or websites. It is not a direct ranking factor. EAT is the aspiration, that Google hopes their Algorithm will (someday) rank by. **

What Google says is that the text should be written like you know what you are talking about. It should also match the way people write in the field.

So you don't need to have credentials, but it helps if you know the specific terms and language. It also helps if other's cite you for your expertise and knowledge. This could also be social engagement linked to the author/the web page.

** AFAIK the role of the human rankers is not to punish individual websites, but to give feedback, if the Google SERPs are surfacing the good results or rather bad one's. In other words their statistics are a factor in testing changes in the algo, if ti matches the human expectation better.

 

[Ryuzaki]

EAT = Links. Fight me.

My opinion is that Google once wanted to profile authors and tried to get us to feed them that information through Google+. They even included authors in the SERPs for a short time. Are they still doing this? I'm guessing it didn't pan out like they wanted, but I see no reason for them to at least not be collecting the data and trying to use it. But unless they can verify claims of degrees, education, and work experience, it's there's no "Trust" in the claimed "Expertise" or "Authority". Only perceived trust that is easily manipulated.

I'd say "E" and "A" are entirely about links, which I'll come back to.

"T" is the most interesting part of this, in my opinion. What denotes "Trust" to Google? We already know the most major way at least at the start is Time. Without time and proving you're not a spammer, there's no trust. Past that, there's other people voting for you that you're trusted and have expertise or at least interesting content, and this is links again. Links are part of trust, as well.

Trust is also a question of you doing the very basics and then a bit more. Do you have a contact page with contact info? Do you have a privacy policy and all that? Do you even have an author box with a person listed in it? Do you have social media profiles you're linking to and preferably with sameAs schema? A bunch of that is probably brand signals as well. Think about what percentage of websites you can immediately tag as low trust just based on this alone. 50% at least?

Back to Expertise and Authority. I don't believe Expertise is being measured based on your unverified claims of being a Ph.D or being reviewed by one. That's all good and should be done, it's a great move. But I doubt Google WAS measuring it (they probably are now). It was a clever SEO invention. I think expertise largely boils down to being cited as an expert through links from other trusted and authoritative sources.

Same goes for authority. Authority derives itself from reputation and that comes from other people talking about you, writing about you (aka linking to you). So while Expertise may come from other experts and authorities linking to you (trust flow?), Authority comes from lots of people linking to you (citation flow?). Maybe Semrush is onto something.

How much of this is already in the algorithm? Page Rank is pretty much a measure of authority while Trust Rank (that's a theoretical flow of juice) handles expertise. Google already has Hilltop algorithms and seed sites and all of that, we can confirm from patents. Whether they use them or not, we don't know, but I'd say it's probably obvious they do.

Anyways, if you ask me, the roll out of EAT to YMYL niches was simply Google cranking up the dial on links. They weighted them far more heavily so the "trusted" sites rose to the top while the untrusted sunk further. It's as simple of an explanation as there could be that fully deals with the complexity of what occurred. Occam's Razor is often completely stupid and wrong, but in this case I think it applies.

 

[bernard]

To add to what @Ryuzaki said about time, this is why peopl use expired domains.

I bought a rather cheap expired domain from Odys, which didn't have great stats, but which still had a standing with google and getting brand searches from day 1 it was online.

Google clearly remembered this site as a former ecommerce store.

When I launch a post, and add it to index with GSC, it gets indexed and ranking instantly. With other new sites, I've literally had months of no indexing.

Expired domains are not perfect, I had one domain that was clearly blacklisted and had some kind of old school -10 or -20 penalty, where I could literally not hit the front page.

This has led me to consider that I've been going about linkbuilding in the wrong way and what you really want to get are high trust links, we're talking newspapers, edu etc.