Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
After studying this module, you should have a good understanding of what Google’s page quality guidelines are, how Google’s search quality raters judge pages using the E-E-A-T criteria, what YMYL pages are, and how to optimize your content to meet Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines.
Video Duration
22:06
Answer Quiz
Take current module quiz
Materials
Ready-to-use templates
Resources
Reports and Resources
E-E-A-T stands for experience-expertise-authoritativeness-trustworthiness. Together, they constitute an important criteria used by Google to rate content on the internet. Until December 2022, the acronym was popularly known as E-A-T. On December 15th, 2022, however, Google updated its criteria to include a content creator’s first-hand experience of the content as an additional parameter on which to rate content quality.
Google now also states that experience, expertise, authoritativeness are all concepts that support the central theme of trust. This is how Google conceptualizes E-E-A-T as contributing to the quality of a web page:
Source
Here’s a look at each of the terms in E-E-A-T:
E-E-A-T is important because Google is constantly striving to provide its users with the most accurate information in the shortest time possible.
Think of why certain websites that pop up on top of search results when you type in queries into the Google search panel.
For instance, for most health-related queries, sites such as WebMD will have the top results. Googling a query on cinema will generally return IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes at the top. Queries about financial matters usually have a site like investopedia.com leading the SERPs.
What all these websites have in common is the fact that Google trusts them to serve the interests of its users best. Each one of these sites is an expert in its domain, commands authority, is trusted by a large number of users and is run by creators with experience in the specific niche.
In short, they fulfill the E-E-A-T criteria.
E-E-A-T doesn’t directly affect where a site ranks on Google’s SERPs. Danny Sullivan, public liaison for Google Search, made it clear in 2019 that its algorithms don’t directly rank pages based on E-A-T, as it was then known. This hasn’t changed.
Google uses human raters because the algorithm can’t make subjective judgements around site content. So, what’s the point of E-E-A-T?
Google cares about returning pages with great content to its users and the Quality Rater guidelines provide great advice on exactly how to improve the quality of your content.
More than that, however, the raters’ evaluations help guide Google’s ongoing development of the search algorithm. Ben Gomes, Google VP of Search Engineering, revealed in 2018 that his team consulted the Quality Raters whenever it tweaked the algorithm.
Essentially, Google uses human evaluators to review websites and evolve a set of standards that it then aims to fold into the algorithm.
Best practice for publishers would be to embrace these guidelines to produce the best content possible. This then also future-proofs your site from algorithm changes down the line.
It is important to note that Google does not view experience, expertise and authoritativeness as always being mutually exclusive. Content creators may acquire expertise and authority due to extensive experience of being associated with a particular subject or field.
The most obvious challenge that publishers face is finding the time to absorb and apply Google’s 176-page E-E-A-T rater guide (PDF download) into their workflow. It’s not enough to read the document, but publishers must also process the info and then develop a strategy for implementation.
This can be broken down into the following:
3.1.4 How Does Google Rate Pages?
To understand E-E-A-T, it is important to first understand how Google rates web pages.
Google rates pages using several different criteria that it broadly splits into two buckets — Page Quality (PQ) and Needs Met (NM).
What Google seeks to determine by applying these criteria to pages are two things that are critical to its business :
To make rating pages more objective, Google divides the content on a page into three categories, or what it calls the parts of a page.
These are:
With this in mind, it’s time to look at how Google interprets and rates page quality.
To determine PQ, Google has a detailed set of guiding principles it calls the search quality guidelines (PDF download). These guidelines are used by trained human search quality raters to rate individual pages on the internet.
Human quality raters feed information back to Google’s engineers using the quality scale based on the aforementioned E-E-A-T criteria. This information is then matched with Google’s algorithm to see if the algorithm is identifying and ranking pages with high expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness correctly.
Below is what a typical PQ analysis by Google looks like:
Needs Met (NM)
NM rating works in a similar fashion to the PQ rating, but the focus now lies in how helpful and satisfying the result on Google’s SERPs is for mobile users based on their online needs.
This is what the NM rating slider (or scale) looks like:
The criteria abbreviations above are as follows:
Strictly speaking, Google lists E-E-A-T as one factor in its list of several Page Quality rating criteria.
However, due to the central importance of E-E-A-T among these factors, the entire set of criteria are collectively referred to by SEO practitioners as E-E-A-T. Also, the items listed under this criteria are not mutually exclusive.
For instance, Main Content (MC) Quality and Amount has a bearing on the authoritativeness of the content. Similarly, Website Information is a determinant of both expertise and trustworthiness.
Therefore for the purpose of this guide, we’ve treated all the points listed in the screenshot above as being a part of E-E-A-T.
With that in mind, we list the most important factors for improving E-E-A-T, and how publishers can implement them.
Page purpose is an assessment of whether a web page was created to benefit users, or whether it was created simply for the purpose of making money, to scam users or to spread disinformation.
If Google does not deem a page to serve any useful purpose, it may demote it.
Pages that score well under Google’s rating criteria have a beneficial page purpose, whereas low-rated pages are created simply for the sake of making money or to spread disinformation.
In Google’s own words, page purpose is an important factor that acts as a determinant for E-E-A-T. In other words, how Google applies the E-E-A-T criteria to a particular page is determined by the purpose that page was created for.
Implement Best Practices for YMYL Content
Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) pages are types of pages or websites that have the potential to impact or harm a person’s health, financial stability or safety, or the welfare or well-being of society.
Google is very conscious about rating and ranking YMYL pages. Examples of low YMYL content include:
In its July 2022 guideline update, Google emphasizes three layers of analysis for scrutinizing YMYL content:
In its December 2022 update, Google specified that while experience, defined as first-hand experience of the content creator in the topic being written about, is an important component of E-E-A-T, for topics in the YMYL niche it may not always be necessary. For some kinds of YMYL content, expertise would be the final arbiter of trustworthiness.
For instance, advice on treatment for liver cancer, or information on how to fill out a tax form would be deemed trustworthy if written by experts in the respective fields. Motivational posts about living with cancer, or humorous videos about the hopeless complexity of tax forms could benefit from first-hand experiences of the content creator.
Because low-quality YMYL sites have the potential to negatively affect the decisions users make when it comes to their lives or wallets, Google takes no shortcuts in rating the page quality (PQ) of these sites:
Publishers that operate in the YMYL space need to be extra careful about meeting the highest standards for E-E-A-T to avoid being penalized by Google. Some best practices to ensure high-quality YMYL content include:
Since Wikipedia has a rigorous editing process, having Wikipedia links to your page tells Google that the source is trusted by users, which also helps improve SEO.
One of the ways in which publishers can demonstrate expertise and trust is by providing author bios with links to their previous works/portfolio/social media handles etc. Include a brief biography, title, awards, education, contact info, stories and other information that might be of value.
All of this lets Google know that the page’s content has been created by real people with real expertise.
It is also important to note that Google uses “reputation” as a factor when assessing page quality. Reputation here refers to the reputation of both the website and the creator of its MC, as assessed by Google’s search quality raters using independently verifiable sources.
The most common method of ascertaining reputation Google deploys is finding articles and reviews about the website or the creator of its MC written by third-party sources, including, but not limited to:
Adding author bios is simple, and in all likelihood you’re already doing this. However, another way of bumping up your trustworthiness is using schema to markup information about the author, nature of your organization and other information.
This helps Google’s web crawlers identify and process this information more easily. Think of it like using a highlighter to highlight important information about the trustworthiness of your website for the benefit of Google’s web crawlers.
Schema markup can be implemented by using HTML tags in the source code of the page. For detailed instructions on how to do this, see our module on schema.
Additionally, it is good to invest in creating a Wikipedia page for your organization, and having your content written by trusted authors with a good online reputation.
This follows directly from the previous point. Make sure to include pages such as “About Us”, “Contact Us”, “Publishing Policies”, “Code of Ethics” or “Privacy Policy” that help both Google and your users clearly understand and identify your organization and its purpose.
Having “About Us” and “Contact Us” pages is also important because Google wants users to be able to contact website owners and report problems with a page or website content, if any. If a page is publishing inaccurate or misleading information, Google needs to know who to hold accountable.
Again, using structured data and schema to highlight this information would be helpful.
Make sure the information on your page is detailed and solves the user’s query. Avoid clickbait headlines, sensationalized coverage and misinformation, as these are the very issues which Google’s E-E-A-T framework has been designed to combat. Google’s search quality guidelines mention “a satisfying amount of high-quality main content” as an important factor in determining page quality.
A great way of ensuring that the information on your website is relevant, detailed and easily accessible to the user is to ensure that it is classified and organized efficiently. One of the most efficient ways to do this is to organize your content in pillars and clusters.
Over time, this helps your website emerge as a topical authority in your domain, helping it to command both trust and authority. See our detailed module on site architecture to learn how to best organize your content to improve SERPs.
Ads by themselves do not impact Google’s assessment of a page’s quality. However, too many ads, ads that pop-up and obscure a part of the screen or the screen in its entirety or ads that slow down a page’s loading time will affect its E-E-A-T score.
See our detailed guide on Ads, Popups and Best Practices and to learn more about how to implement ad and sponsored content best practices on your website.
This may not be as important as the points we’ve already talked about, but having a good social media presence is vital to improving your E-E-A-T signals in two ways:
We’ve looked at the things we need to do to attain a high E-E-A-T score, now it’s time to look at those practices we need to avoid. These include:
While Google does not have any officially-stated preference for human-created content over content churned out by artificial intelligence (AI) powered content creation tools, most AI tools are yet to reach a level of development where they can successfully replace a skilled human writer and editor.
If you use AI-powered tools to create content, make sure to monitor it carefully so that the content it produces remains relevant, and does not meander off into supplementary topics, as can often happen with unsupervised use of AI-powered content creation tools.
Google’s guiding philosophy is to solve the problems of its users who are searching for information on the internet.
As a publisher, if you can solve a user’s query and in the process sell or advertise your own products and services, it’s a win-win for both sides. However, if your website or page overwhelms the user with sales pitches or advertisements without providing relevant information, Google will likely mark your page as being of low quality.
It’s important to note that while we’ve studied sites that rank well and have good E-E-A-T, the former is not directly influenced by the latter.
Rather, these sites have embraced practices that have improved their overall page quality, which attracts a greater number of visitors and backlinks, leading Google to rank them higher.
Snopes.com is an internet fact-checking website that has been around since 1994. The site seeks to debunk hoaxes and myths on the internet. Below is a screenshot of one of its pages.
The first things we note here are a clearly mentioned author name and links to all the portal’s social media handles. The author’s name is hyperlinked to her detailed bio and a list of all the articles she has written for Snopes.com
We also notice that the top menu has a “Shop” section, and the website uses display ads. Both these strategies help the site owners to monetize their content without compromising on E-E-A-T.
Looking at how this page holds up to the criteria we discussed earlier in this module, we can see:
In this case, the writer even provides a list of sources consulted at the end to further reinforce the authority of the piece.
The website is HTTPS secured and is fast to load.
Our next example is a website in the YMYL niche.
When we search for the keywords “blood pressure” on Google.com, heart.org is the first result that shows up.
Content about blood pressure is critical information that could directly impact peoples’ lives, meaning there’s less wriggle room than on other sites.
Looking at the best practices we recommended in our section on YMYL content, we notice that this page follows most of the suggestions we’d recommended. These include:
Publishers see the best results when they align their SEO efforts with Google’s core philosophy. This core philosophy is providing their users with the best answers for their queries in the shortest possible time.
To achieve this, Google rates all content on the internet using a set of guidelines popularly called E-E-A-T.
Although E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, we recommend viewing it in conjunction with other allied criteria such as that for page purpose.
Publishers need to remember that content in the YMYL niche must meet an even more stringent set of criteria for Google to consider it as being of good quality.
Ultimately, the best strategy to attain a good E-E-A-T score is to publish content that is rich in detail while sticking to the relevant topic. Make sure you share as much detail about yourself, your writers, your website and your purpose as is possible.
Follow best practices such as keeping ads relevant and non-disruptive and organizing your content efficiently for easier access and for developing topical authority.
Following these steps will ensure your content meets Google’s expectations for E-E-A-T.
Active now
See more
