Google E-A-T Is Not What You Think It Is

ByAmrith Sudhakaran

Are you procrastinating or second guessing yourself because of all the fuss about Google E-A-T and YMYL?

Maybe, you’re holding yourself back from starting a new site because you think you don’t have the necessary credentials.

Or perhaps, you’re finding it difficult and expensive to hire writers with the right qualifications.

But here’s the thing:

E-A-T is a made-up term that you can find only in Google’s search quality evaluator guidelines.

E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And E-A-T is a framework that Google created to help search quality evaluators measure the performance of the algorithm.

John Muller from the Google Search Central YouTube channel said that the search quality evaluator guidelines is not a handbook on how the algorithm works.

Who Are Search Quality Evaluators?

Google makes changes to its algorithms every day. But before Google rolls out each change, they test the impact of the change using a team of search quality evaluators.

These evaluators rate pages on a scale from lowest to highest. The levels on the scale are:

  • Lowest
    • Lowest+
  • Low
    • Low+
  • Medium
    • Medium+
  • High
    • High+
  • Highest

The search quality rater guidelines has detailed instructions for determining the quality of the page at each level. We’ll look into these factors a little later in the article.

Is E-A-T a Ranking Factor?

E-A-T is a quality characteristic of a page. A page may have a very high level of E-A-T, high level of E-A-T, low level of E-A-T, or lack E-A-T.

From the quality rater guidelines, I found 7 factors that influence these levels of E-A-T.

They are:

  • Transparency
  • Reputation
  • Comprehensiveness
  • Production Quality
  • Consensus
  • Novelty
  • Associations

Many of the factors above play a major role in deciding where your page ranks. In this sense, E-A-T does affect rankings.

But at the same time, there is no E-A-T score. Nor has Google quantified expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Therefore, E-A-T isn’t a direct ranking factor.

So, for all practical purposes, you can completely ignore E-A-T because it is a term that is meaningful only to the search quality evaluators.

However, you should pay attention to the seven factors that influence E-A-T. That’s what is going to improve your rankings.

7 Factors Influencing E-A-T

I’ve listed the 7 factors influencing E-A-T. Let me give you a one-sentence description of each factor. Thereafter, I’ll dive into each factor in greater detail.

  • Transparency – The degree to which the search engine and the visitors can find who is responsible for the information on the site.
  • Reputation – The overall sentiment about the website and the creator of the page.
  • Comprehensiveness – The extent to which the creator of the page and the website has covered the topic.
  • Production Quality – Evidence of time, effort, expertise, talent, and skill invested in creation of the page.
  • Consensus – Alignment with what existing authority on the topic have to say.
  • Novelty – Adding information to enrich existing conversations about the topic.
  • Associations – Quality of references going out of the page and website as well as those coming into the page and website.

Now, let’s look at each of the above factors:

What is Transparency?

Google cares deeply about who is responsible for the website and about the person creating the main content of the page.

Typically, content publishers include this sort of information on the ‘About Us’ page.

But in many cases, such pages fail to include anything more than just superficial information.

When people land on the about us page, your aim should be to provide information that inspires confidence in these visitors about your ability to provide the information and support they need and are looking for.

To do this, you must address several questions that are on the visitor’s mind. I’m categorizing these questions into three broad groups – questions about you, your company, and your authors.

Let’s explore these questions:

Questions about You – The Owner

In addition to including biographical information such as your name, where you’re from, and your designation, you could also talk about the following:

  • What formal or informal training and/or education have you received – your qualification
  • What principles do you hold dear – your core values
  • What event in life set you on your present course – your turning point
  • How you see the world changing as a result of what you do – your vision for the future
  • What excites and animates you about the industry you’re in – your passion
  • Who inspires and motivates you in your industry – your mentor figures
  • What are the moments you’re proud of – your victories
  • What’s it like to be you – a day in the life of you
  • Who do you surround yourself with – your team
  • Whom do you like to hangout with – your audience
  • How do you hope to affect those whom you meet – your contribution
  • What are your current areas of improvement – your challenges
  • What have you learned from negative events – your failures

By providing information about these areas, your visitors can construct a mental image of who you are. Without any such information, you’re just a picture and a profile to your visitors.

You must have heard marketing professionals speak of creating a customer avatar or a buyer persona. But don’t you think it makes sense to create your persona for your visitors?

Questions about Your Website/Company/Organization

Your website, company, or organization is a living entity.

One of the signs of life is growth. And if you look back at your company’s origin story, you will see that it has been growing – every single day.

Therefore, it makes sense to create a persona for the company. The company’s persona is similar to the one you create for yourself. But instead of answering these questions from your perspective, you answer them from the company’s perspective.

So, when I adjust the questions in the previous section to suit the company’s perspective, let’s see what we get.

First, begin with biographical information such as the company’s name, base of operation, and expertise. Thereafter, cover the following questions:

  • How did you come about – company’s origin story
  • What are the company-wide principles you adhere to – company’s core values
  • Whom do you help – company’s target audience
  • What do you help them with – company’s services or products
  • How many people have you helped – company’s client base
  • How well have you helped them – company’s testimonials and reviews
  • What do you do when things go wrong – company’s customer service policy
  • How do yourself expanding in the years ahead – company’s vision
  • What makes you tick – company’s people and process
  • What makes you different – company’s USP
  • What keeps you excited & motivated – company’s current projects and progress
  • What keeps you up at night – company’s challenges
  • Who are your collaborators – company’s network

When you project your company as a living entity, you turn it into a brand that people can get behind.

Questions about Your Team

For many websites – at least during the initial phases – the site’s owner is the only content creator.

In such cases, the owner’s information is enough.

However, when you start publishing content from other authors. Make sure you create a page for the author.

The aim of this page is to create a persona for the author. So, you can use the same questions used to create the owner’s section.

The Info-Pages are an Evolving Document

When you create the info pages for yourself, the company, and others associated with the company, you can start with whatever information is available to you right now.

Also, while answering these questions, many people like to write what they think the visitors want to read. Avoid this tendency. Instead, write what feels true to you.

If you don’t get an immediate sense of how to answer the question, let it rest; don’t wrestle with it. It will come to you later.

And at all costs – do not lie, embellish, or manipulate.

Keep coming back to the page once a week. You will find many things to add, remove, or improve.

Remember – you’re doing all this to signal trustworthiness. So, being honest about all this is key.

What is Reputation?

Your site has certain named entities associated with it. These named entities are:

  • Name of the website
  • Name of the person, company, organization that owns the website
  • Names of the key people working in the company
  • Names of branded products and services

Google looks at what the broad sentiment is around these named entities. Absence of a positive sentiment is not a problem. So, you don’t have to worry about how reputation affects new websites.

However, mixed sentiments or negative sentiments can impact the ranking of the website.

So, look online for what the internet says about these named entities.

Google has a maxim that if what you say on your site is at odds with what an independent source says about your website, what the independent source says carries more weight.

Therefore, getting your name out on the web organically and proactively can help you build a positive sentiment around your named entities.

For example, the named entities related to my business are – amrith sudhakaran and smartcontentwriter.com.

Right now, there isn’t any negative sentiment about these two entities.

Now, I’d go about building a positive sentiment in two ways – organic and proactive.

Organic Sentiment Building

I release one video on YouTube every week. I use these YouTube videos to organically build a positive sentiment around myself and my website.

I also share these video on LinkedIn to get some social media millage around myself and my brand.

These methods are organic because once I publish my content, I have no control over where it pops up and what people say about my brand and my name.

Proactive Sentiment Building

I get in touch with authority websites in the SEO and digital marketing space to look for opportunities for writing guest posts. For example, right now, I’m working on a pitch for Oncrawl based on the research I’ve done related to query clustering.

I also plan to use HARO to get myself and my website mentioned in authoritative websites.

You can also use traditional out reach methods to target expired backlinks on high authority sites and request them to link to your resource instead.

These methods are proactive because you have control over where your name appears and in what context.

After you publish an initial corpus of content, you must look into building a positive sentiment around your named entities.

What to do in Case of Negative Sentiment

If, for some reason, there’s a negative sentiment around your named entities, you’ll need to evaluate the damage to your brand.

For instance, if someone types your name and the first result on Google is a YouTube video about you running a scam, then you need to address that pronto.

To do this, you will have to get in touch with the person who published the information and come to an agreement to better the situation. You might even have to consider legal action.

You might have to look at each case individually and clean up your reputation. This is a complex issue and is outside my area of expertise. But I’m sure there are services available to handle this sort of stuff.

What Do I Mean by Comprehensiveness?

In 2012, Google patented a method to generate questions related to search queries. The patent mentions a questions database.

This patent is perhaps the basis for the questions you see in the People also ask section.

Given Google’s ability to create questions and answers from a corpus of text along with the number of searches people enter in the search bar, we can say that Google has a large database of questions related to any given topic.

For example, I discovered 8000+ queries questions related to the topic bulldogs.

Now, how many articles do you think it would take to address these questions? My guess is that it would require 300+ pages.

If you look at the first row in the image below, you will see that the domain akc.org is ranking for 7607 of 8303 queries related to bulldogs. This domain has 504 pages related to bulldogs. So, if you want to dominate this topic, this is the site to beat.

Query Coverage for the Top 10 Domains with Content Related to Bulldogs

Does this mean that you have to publish 500+ articles? Not really. Look at the row for akc.org in the image below. This shows us that akc.org has 1730 of 8303 queries ranking on the first page.

Query Coverage for Top 10 Domains Covering the topic Bulldogs

This means that the domain is not ranking on the first page for 5877 queries. In terms of pages, akc.org has just 216 out of 504 pages ranking on the first page.

Therefore, to take the top spot, you should be looking at publishing around 250+ pages.

Interestingly, if you look at the last row, the domain frenchie.world has only 1222 queries ranking on the first page. In terms of number of pages, this domain has 124 pages ranking on the first page.

Thus, to enter the top 10 domains in the niche, you’re looking at creating 150+ pages.

Next, let’s look at a site that has around 30 pages ranking on the first page. The site allaboutfrenchies.com has 33 articles ranking on the first page. With this ranking profile, the site has 59 sites ahead of it.

Therefore, Google is unlikely to consider this site an authority on the topic. Especially when you have sites with 404+ pages ranking on the first page of Google.

So, in order to establish some sort of authority with Google, you should compete for the top 10 spots. While putting together your content plan, you must also calculate the number of pages you need to publish to reach the top 10.

This is what I mean by comprehensiveness.

Comprehensiveness is a definitely a ranking factor. And you should set realistic expectations about what it takes to become an authority in your niche.

Why Does Production Quality Matter?

Consider two sites. The first one is an FAQ-style page that just has questions and answers.

The second one is an informational page that has a table of contents, well-written headlines, bold phrases for easy scanning, lists, table, custom images, infographics, and custom videos.

Which one do you think has better production quality? Well, the answer is the second page.

But here’s the thing – is production quality a ranking factor?

In the search quality evaluator guidelines, high or highest quality content requires evidence of the content creator investing a significant amount of time, expertise, skill, and talent in producing and presenting the content.

Now, it may not be practical for you to have all your pages be of very high production quality. In such cases, make sure that the primary pages in your silo are of very high production quality.

If you’re not familiar with content siloing, you’ll find my article on building content silos helpful.

Here are a few things you can include on your page to increase production quality:

  • Custom images (with watermark)
  • Custom videos
  • Tables – Databases, Factsheets, Info-Tables
  • Lists
  • Infographics
  • Calculators
  • Interactive Layouts
  • Structured Data Markup
  • PDFs or other Downloadable Items
  • Fast Loading Time
  • Mobile Responsive Content
  • Easy Navigation Across Content
  • Well Crafter Headings
  • Bold Formatted Phrases
  • Meaningful Anchor Text

Warning: We’re Not Going for Perfection

The production quality of your page must be significantly higher than the production quality of other pages.

But don’t get caught in the perfection trap. Here’s what I recommend you do.

Check the top 5 pages about the topic you’re targeting. Then, use a checklist to see how many of the above elements are present in those pages.

Then, look at what’s missing and add that to your page.

If producing a video is time consuming, you can put up an infographic. If creating infographics takes too much time, use custom photos. If that is time consuming, use stock photos.

The idea is to achieve a good balance between production quality and productivity.

If you find the top pages in your topic are beyond your reach in terms of production quality, you must look for a different topic to cover. But perfect – or even near perfect – pages are rare. So, don’t worry too much about this.

What Does Consensus Mean?

In addition to pages Google has crawled, Google also has access to information from many other sources such as millions of books from public libraries and data from other public sources.

Based on the information, Google can detect consensus regarding a topic where it exists.

By consensus, I mean common ground; there are some facts that are almost universally acknowledged to be true.

Therefore, when you publish content about the topic, you must not go against the grain. When you go against what is universally agreed upon, the algorithm is likely to treat your claims with suspicion.

So, does this mean that there’s no scope for differing opinions?

Typically, when Google is not able to detect consensus regarding a topic, it is likely to display forum results in the SERP. The forum result provides multiple points of view about the subject.

And if you see forum results such as Quora outranking an article from another page that seems on-point, then it means the topic seems to have a lot of grey area.

Here’s an example:

Here you can see a forum result outranking a page that has a title that’s pretty much on-point.

But sometimes, you see cases where the answer the search engine provides is inaccurate.

This typically happens when Google shows a general, one-size-fits all answer to a question that has several subtleties.

In such cases, you can begin by providing the general answer. This provides the required consensus.

After that, in the next paragraph, you can explain the factors that cause deviation from the general consensus.

Once you list the factors, you can address the factors within the same page or create a new page to explain these factors and how they modify the general answer.

So, acknowledge the consensus before you challenge it.

What do I Mean by Novelty?

In 2012, when Google announced its shift from strings to things, it had a knowledge graph of 3.5 billion facts about 500 million entities. As of 2020, the knowledge graph has grown to include 500 billion facts about 5 billion entities.

In case you’re not familiar with the terms knowledge graph and entities, let me give you a quick overview.

An entity is someone or something that exists in the real-world. Entities may be conceptual or material.

A knowledge graph is a collection of these entities along with the relationship between them.

For example, Google is able to show you this knowledge panel about bulldogs because of its knowledge graph.

Now, compare this with the knowledge panel for poodle:

You can see that the knowledge panel for bulldog doesn’t include origin and temperament. The knowledge panel for bulldogs also doesn’t include information about the height of various varieties of bulldogs.

This means that if I create a tables that covers origin, temperament, height & weight information about breeds of bulldogs, I am helping Google expand its knowledge graph.

This is what I mean by novelty.

By helping Google learn more about the entities in its knowledge graph, you can increase your value to the search engine. In return, the search engine rewards you with greater authority.

To implement this strategy, imagine the perfect SERP for a topic. You can look at the SERP for similar topics to see what the SERP looks like. Thereafter, identify the gaps.

Once you identify the gaps, provide the information in a way that Google can easily understand it.

You can do the same with queries as well.

So far, you’ve been writing responses to questions that Google has found about the topic. But you can also add questions that you know Google isn’t even asking. This is another way of helping Google expand its knowledge graph and database of questions.

One way you can do this is to break a question into its components. For example, the main question might be – how much does a bulldog cost.

But you can break it down into smaller components such as accessories, food, grooming, health, and hygiene.

By doing this, you’re helping Google expand its knowledge about bulldogs. And this novelty factor will earn you rich rewards in the form of rankings.

How Does Association Affect Ranking?

We’ve already seen that Google looks at the things in the world as entities. Your website and its content creators are entities as well.

If you have a new website and you personally don’t have much presence online, Google doesn’t have much information about you as an entity.

Therefore, in order to tell Google where it should put you in its knowledge graph, you should start making connections to well-established entities.

This is the reason SEOs ask you to link to authority websites in your niche.

But, by linking to authority websites in your niche, you’re increasing their authority. Thus, you’re increasing competition for yourself – although its only to a minute extent.

So, instead of linking to authority sites you’re competing with, link to direct sources of data from websites that are run and maintained by government agencies and educational institutions.

For example, in this article, I’m linking directly to the patent office instead of linking to any other website. Whenever possible – go directly to the source.

Contextual Clues

Linking to known entities related to your topic is one way to help Google identify your place in the knowledge graph. Another method is to place contextual clues in your content.

Let’s play a game. Based on the contextual clues, can you figure out what the missing word is in the following image?

Based on the entities around the hidden word, you might have guessed what that hidden word is.

(It’s Titanic)

But whether you guessed the word correctly or not isn’t important. What is important is for you to recognize how contextual clues work.

So, if you include these contextual clues in your content, Google has an easier time figuring out what your content is all about.

Now, you may be thinking – “How do we find these contextual clues”?

Well, the answer is available on the SERP. Typically, these contextual clues are the ones formatted in bold. But these are just the basic ones. To comprehensively cover all the important contextual tools, you’ll need to use your expertise in the field.

Or, you’ll have to reverse engineer them from the content available on the SERP.

Note – this is not the same as LSI keywords. LSI keywords relate to Google Ads and not to how Google ranks content.

So, don’t bother with LSI keywords.

Conclusion

What’s the big take away from all this?

First, E-A-T is a made-up concept that exists only to help Google’s search quality evaluators.

Second, evaluators rate the E-A-T of a page based on 7 factors. We’ve discussed these factors in depth.

Therefore, focusing on these factors will automatically take care of E-A-T.

Next, YMYL topics are topics that require a high level of E-A-T. So, while every page requires some amount of E-A-T, YMYL pages require high to very high levels of E-A-T.

Using the 7 factors mentioned in the article, it is possible to achieve high E-A-T level. Therefore, YMYL shouldn’t be an obstacle if you’re committed to working on the 7 factors mentioned here.

Of course, if you’ve never started a website, all this might be too much to do. So, my recommendation is to pick a non-YMYL niche.

And if you are an experienced content creator with a solid team and a big budget, topic dominance is very much within your reach by leveraging the 7 factors here.

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