What is Google E-A-T?
Google E-A-T refers to Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It was a concept published in an edition of the Search Quality Guidelines in the year of 2014. The guidelines are put to use during Google’s search quality evaluations. In these guidelines, it hires thousands of quality reviewers who are tasked with manually reviewing a set of webpages. It also helps in submitting feedback about the quality of those pages to Google. The feedbacks of the raters is then used as a benchmark. This is then be used by Google to improve its algorithms. E-A-T serves as the criteria for Google about a website. This can be used in the form of measurement of expert content that can be trusted. This way the reviewers can get information about all the websites and decide which one to trust.
Working of Google E-A-T algorithm
Importantly it states that “For all other pages that have a beneficial purpose, the amount of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) is very important” and Google always advises it’s reviewers to consider a few things before rating a website. The first thing is the website itself. Also, the creators of that website’s content are to be kept in mind. The E-A-T of the main content of the webpage the reviewers are analyzing is equally important.
In the version of E-A-T before the update, it is only mentioned 135 times in 167 pages. Within a few years, E-A-T has been a topic of discussion for the SEO industry (Search Engine Optimization). E-A-T has been a discussion since it relates to organic traffic performance changes. This happened ever since Google’s core algorithm updates began on August 1, 2018.
YMYL
SEO began to theorize that E-A-T played a major role in the updates. This seems to overwhelmingly affect YMYL (Your Money Your Life) websites with significant E-A-T issues. Though the discussion around E-A-T quickly led to confusion, misunderstanding, and misconstruing of facts. There was a result of the confusion between what is a theory and what is currently live in Google’s algorithm. The goal of Google E-A-T is surfacing results with this algorithm and what it is supposed to do. However, E-A-T itself is not an explanation of how the algorithms currently work.
According to Gary Illyes
According to Gary Illyes in a recent question and answer session during Pubcon – “Google has a collection of millions of tiny algorithms that work in unison to spit out a ranking score. Many baby algorithms look for signals in pages or content”, that can be conceptualized as E-A-T. E-A-T is not a specific algorithm. Google’s algorithms, however, look for signals both and on off-site that correlate with good or bad E-A-T. An example is Pagerank that uses links on the web to understand authoritativeness. Gary Illyes also confirmed there is “no internal E-A-T score or YMYL score.”
Moreover, according to Google, “high E-A-T medical advice should be written or produced by people or organizations with appropriate medical expertise or accreditation”.
