For a long time I avoided writing or talking about EEAT.
Having been a Google Quality Assessor (almost a decade now), I quickly realized what EEAT was: human language to describe the end goal of the algorithm so that assessors without access to Google data can evaluate algorithms.
With the recent clarification that EEAT is not a rating signalfactor or system, I want to go in and hit several key points.
First of all, what is EEAT?
As you probably already know, EEAT stands for Eexperience, Eexperience, Aauthority, i Toxidizability The experience part is the newest. The concept was originally launched as just EAT.
Many have argued that it should be EEATT to include punctuality, but in this case, I think we could come up with much more interesting acronyms.
Where does EEAT come from?
The EEAT comes from the Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. It is important to remember that the QRG is no a list of classification factors, systems or signals. They are guides that human assessors can use for various tasks.
These tasks can include comparing sets of search results and seeing which is better, or comparing pages to see which is most relevant to a query.
Evaluator data may be used to evaluate proposed algorithm changes or to create test sets that Google uses in other internal evaluations. However, qualifiers have no direct impact on the actual ranking algorithms, penalties, etc.
Why are you talking about EEAT right now?
Thanks to some wording changes to the SEO Starter Guide and Google Search link tweets by Danny Sullivan, questions are popping up on the topic. This led me to make one thread Xand several people responded asking for a blog post, so here we are.
It all started with this tweet where Sullivan says that the common elements that EEAT SEOs talk about aren’t actually ranking factors.
It is not a ranking factor. It’s not something that takes other factors into account. Having an expert write things doesn’t magically make you better, because 1) anyone can declare that someone is an expert, and that doesn’t mean anything and 2) somehow we don’t try to check that…
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) February 7, 2024
Here, Sullivan discusses EEAT in general and what SEOs think makes up EEAT. It clarifies that none of these are actually ranking factors.
For some time, SEOs have been talking about tactics that have been rumored to form EEAT such as:
Have biographies and author profiles on the pages. Make sure the board says it has been reviewed by an expert. Including relevant contact information on the page. Link or get links from authorities.
The problem is that they don’t, because there is no EEAT score.
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Why doesn’t Google use these things?
The web is huge and diverse. There are so many ways to code things and so many ways to mess up coding things that it’s hard to get specific types of information from pages.
This is one of the reasons why search engines like Google and Bing created structured data, schemas and XML sitemaps, to make their job easier.
Remember when Google used to have the rel=author markup? How many SEOs abused it? The answer is a lot!
If you’ve ever tried to build your own web crawler (and you should!), you’ll know how difficult it is to just extract a date from a page. With numerous formats, encoding methods, and potential locations, numerous libraries exist just for guessing dates.
The same goes for authorship or contact information. It’s not easy to crawl and scrape at the scale of the web. Using the things SEOs think Google uses in a robust and scalable way would be difficult.
They could probably figure it out, but then there’s the whole SEO issue. SEOs love to manipulate these things.
As soon as SEOs started saying we need author profiles to rank (reminder: we don’t), all the black hats started creating fake authors and profiles for their AI-generated content. They started saying it was reviewed by an expert, etc.
Should they get a rating boost for that? How do you say they made it up instead of actually doing it? Humans can easily tell with research and critical thinking, but can a bot? Would there be a bot?
If concepts like expertise and authority were only derived from taking your word for it on the page, we wouldn’t even need concepts like expertise and authority in the first place.
Search engines can do better than taking your word for it
Search engines have many signals they can use that don’t rely on taking your word for your EEAT.
Marginal note: When I use terms like witness, factor, signal, and system, we use them to mean different things. However, for the purposes of Google’s documentation, as Sullivan clarifiesthey are often used interchangeably.
For clarity, here is how I use the terms:
Token: the smallest piece of data in a query, document, etc. It can be a part of word, a word, an n-gram, etc.
signal: Any feature of a document, link, query, etc.
factor: something with a weight used in ranking. It can be a signal, a combination of signals, the output of a system, etc.
system: Process factors and/or signals. It can manipulate ratings, output signals, or other factors.
Using my definitions, EEAT it is not a signal, a factor or a system. Let’s get that out of the way.
So if the search engines aren’t using the things they mention in the QRG, what could they be using?
If I had to guess, I’d say that the actual signals used to reward authoritative sites boil down to a version of PageRank (i.e., link authority) and aggregated click data from search logs that they are fed into some kind of machine learning algorithm.
What do I mean by aggregate click data? It’s about looking at massive amounts of click data and no “Users clicked on this site for this query.”
We’re talking about data like “over 100 million clicks, the results with the most clicks had a higher PageRank and included the keyword in the title and 700 other things…”.
Could there be some domain level metrics here? Maybe, but it doesn’t really matter for the scope of this article.
Instead of taking your word for authority, search engines can take the word of their users as a whole. If your site is more authoritative and trustworthy, people will link to it more.
But links are not enough; spam can be sent. This is where aggregated click data comes in.
If your site is authoritative, users will click on it. Remember, I’m talking at the aggregate macro level here. Analysis of the log file! I am no say that clicks to an individual site for a specific query are a ranking factor. That’s a whole different debate.
However, look at the SERP as a whole. If one variant of the ranking algorithm gets more clicks on top-ranking sites than another, it could be doing a better job of rewarding the most reliable sites.
A machine learning algorithm can quickly figure out if the sites clicked on above share the same common characteristics. A search engine can use this type of data to evaluate algorithms or adjust rankings.
(Again, this is not based on individual clicks, but on finding the common set of features shared by the clicked sites above. It’s probably weird math stuff about content and links.)
So where does the QRG definition come in?
Remember the raters? They:
You do not have access to link data or click data. You have no machine learning outputs. Don’t have hundreds of signs about every place to look at. They do not directly affect the ranking of any site. The algorithm is not being trained.
Rather, they provide Google engineers with consistent data to measure algorithm changes.
To do this, they need a human language for what kinds of things a human believes align with expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
Ideally, algorithmic signals will align with humans, and if they don’t, Google will continue to adjust.
The good news is that since none of these traditional EEAT signals (author bios, etc.) are fed into the machine learning algorithms, you really don’t. need (or you have to fake them) to classify them.
So I don’t need author bios, contact information, expert reviews, or other EEAT-related items for my content?
If ranking is all you care about, then no, you don’t need it.
That said, most of us care about users, conversions, sales, etc., and users love those things.
For many searches, users prefer to read content written by a real person. But that doesn’t mean the dictionary definition or product descriptions of sweatpants need biographies of human authors. No real human wants that.
Similarly, humans seeking medical information want factual information from or reviewed by a physician. Still, that doesn’t mean you have to have a doctor review your article about recycling tires or building a tree house.
Almost everything SEOs recommend doing for EEAT are good things for users, you know, your real audience. So yes, do these things if it makes sense to your users.
The better their experience, the more likely they are to link to you, share your content, pass on your business card, or click on your results. These things can help you rank higher.
Please make sure it makes sense for your users before spending a ton of money on experts you may not need and your users may not want.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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