Google E-A-T

E-A-T is short for expertise, authority and trust. The concept is in SEO as a guideline for search evaluators for the evaluation of search results. E-A-T is especially important for YMYL (Your money your life) websites. The first time the concept was mentioned was in the 2015 Google Quality Rater Guidelines. E-A-T rates a website's content on its expertise, authority and credibility.

The content of a page is also evaluated for its quality. The E-A-T rating differentiates between main content and suplementary content. Sense of the concept is it to offer to the users as High Quality content as possible.

What are the Google Quality Rater?

The Google Quality Raters are people from all over the world who have no direct influence on the ranking of a website. Your job is to provide feedback for website content. This feeds into the fine-tuning of the algorithm.

Quality Rater Guidelines are not equivalent to ranking factors – yet they play a critical role in evaluating website quality. They act like a compass for content creators and marketing specialists, telling them which articles work well for a website.

Google says raters are trained to understand whether website content has what the company defines as a strong E-A-T – expertise, authority and trustworthiness. Reading the guidelines helps webmasters assess the performance of their content from the E-A-T perspective and consider improvements to the topics or an update.

The three parameters of expertise, authority and trustworthiness

The E in E-A-T stands for Expertise. This refers to an author's knowledge, expertise and experience in a particular field. Expertise refers exclusively to the publisher or author. Is he an expert in the field he writes about or is he more of a generalist? If a dentist writes an article about maintaining healthy teeth, the search engine algorithms will grant him more expertise and rate his article as more relevant than if a journalist writes a specialist article on the same topic after two days of research.

The A in E-A-T stands for authority. Authority refers to the notoriety of a website, author or content on a website. Google algorithms like high-quality text written by thought leaders in their industry. If someone is considered a representative of his industry or if a company is considered a pioneer in a certain field, this has a positive effect on the ranking of the article in the search results. On the other hand, low-quality content is bad for SEO and ranks lower in search results.

The T in E-A-T stands for trust/trustworthiness. This parameter evaluates the credibility of the author, the website or the information on the website on the respective subject area. The key here is the fundamental certainty of a site. A positive impact on a site's trustworthiness is if there are high-quality backlinks pointing to it, if it has SSL encryption, if there is an internal customer service or privacy policy. The general reputation of a brand also plays a role here.

Crucial to the E-A-T concept is the fact that the three factors complement each other. A good SEO therefore always starts with all three factors and does not focus unilaterally on one of them.

• How to improve your company or brand's reputation online?

What is YMYL?

YMYL stands for Your money your life. YMYL can refer to topics and content of websites, as well as to the source or domain. YMYL embraces site and content around the issues:

• News and current events: This includes in particular news about the economy, politics, technology, science and international events. Not all messages count towards YMYL. Lifestyle themes, entertainment or sports are excluded.
• Shopping: This section includes information related to researching and purchasing goods or services. Sites where users make online purchases are also included.
• Finance: This includes information related to taxes, loans, investments, retirement planning, insurance or banking transactions. Sites where money transfers or online purchases can be made are particularly prominent.
• Government and legal: information pertaining to public agencies, government agencies, voting, social services, and all common legal issues fall into this category.
• Health and safety: this is about information related to medical issues, emergency preparedness, medications or hospitals. Info about how dangerous certain activities are also falls under this heading.
• Groups of People: This section is about information about specific groups of people or their entitlements. It may be representatives of a particular ethnicity, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, or gender.
• Other topics: Many other topics fall under YMYL that affect important aspects or momentous life decisions of people. Thus, nutrition and fitness, the selection of a university or job search fall under this item.

For site owners, the definition of the search engine giant should always serve as a guideline when it comes to good ranking and appropriate SEO measures. This is: a high quality site should have a useful purpose and serve it well.

What are the guidelines for evaluating the quality of the search?

They used to be known as the Quality Rater Guidelines – Google's guidelines that dealt with search quality. These days, they're called the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, or General Guidelines for short. 2013 was the first time Google published these guidelines, which to this day are only issued to Quality Raters and are not available to everyone. At the beginning of 2013, there was an official, but short version of the guidelines, with the 02. November 2012 as the creation date. Since that time, Google has always published updated versions of the guidelines.

From the guidelines, there are characteristics that high quality pages must possess, which is exciting for the selection of SEO measures. Whether a website is ranked "high" or "very high" by Google depends primarily on the level of E-A-T rating, the reputation of the website, and the quality of the MC. The following criteria for high quality sites emerge: – Expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are true for both the site itself and the author.

• There is a fair amount of quality content, which in turn is a testament to the expertise of the author, their skill and the effort they have put into creating the content.
• The website itself has expert status and authority, it is trustworthy as far as the subject is concerned.
• The website has a reasonable reputation.
• The site is well maintained.
• A functional web design makes it easier for visitors to navigate the site.
• Visitors will find sufficient information about the operators, the terms and conditions or the privacy policy.

How to recognize a low-quality website?

The low quality of a web page is indicated by the lack of expertise of the author and the poor quality of the content. The web page possesses no topic authority and/or it lacks trustworthiness. There is little content here, which in the worst case is copied from another website. Because of ads or other elements, users have a hard time consuming the content on the website. The website lacks transparency in terms of its purpose and operators. The website has a poor reputation.

The Medic Update of 2018

Big impact especially on the ranking of medical and healthcare pages had the Google core update in August 2018, also called Medic Update. The update had an impact on 42% of pages from the healthcare industry, but pages that covered financial topics were not spared either. In some cases, sites have had to deal with ranking losses of up to 90%. SEO experts assume that since this update the E-A-T concept plays a greater role. A short time later, another update followed, in which above all the aspect of trustworthiness in content was given more importance.

How does E-A-T affect search on Google?

In the wake of Google's major Core Updates in 2018 and 2019, factors around the E-A-T concept gained importance for a website's ranking on Google. The company itself has never commented on which signals actually matter to E-A-T. There is evidence for this in white papers and in the said Quality Rater Guidelines.

Why is E-A-T so important for SEO??

Next to the quality of a site's content and relevance to search intent, E-A-T are the third most important point in a site's online marketing. For several years, there has been great pressure on Google regarding misinformation in search results. As a result, the company is committed to optimizing its search system in this regard. It wants to present the user with the best search results, which come from the most reliable sources. Quality raters are of particular importance.

Google itself has revealed that they publish publicly available rating guidelines that describe in great detail how their systems aim to bring great content to light. They indicate that the search is designed to reflect relevant results from the most reliable sources available. But notions of relevance and trustworthiness are ultimately human judgments. To measure whether their systems are actually getting it right, they need to gather insights from humans.

E-A-T criteria evaluation plays an important role for quality raters. They evaluate whether those pages meet the information need based on their understanding of what that query was looking for. They take into account criteria such as the relevance and trustworthiness of a source in relation to the topic in the search query. To evaluate criteria such as expertise, authority, and trustworthiness of a website, raters are tasked with conducting reputation research on sources.

Critical to the customer experience

When using Google, high quality search results are crucial to a good customer experience. The company itself told that there were big problems with the quality of search results especially in the years 2008 to 2011. They received many complaints about low quality content, which were justified. While a website could be of low quality, relevance metrics continued to rise. This was due to the fact that even a website with low quality can be very relevant. The numbers confirmed that the search engine performed exceptionally well, but at the same time delivered a terrible user experience. As a result, the company finally defined an explicit quality metric that directly addresses the issue of quality. It is not the same as relevance and it allows quality related signals to be developed separately from relevant signals and improve them independently.

How are the criteria for ranking a website composed?

For the most part, the search engine tries to understand the content and context of web pages individually in order to display them correctly in search. However, there are some points where it looks at a website as a whole. If, for example, a new page is added to a website and the search engine has never seen this page before, it does not know what the content and context of it are. Then, understanding what type of site it is helps it better understand where to start with that new page in search.

The ranking is therefore about the individual pages as well as the website as a whole. Google looks at many different factors and there is not just one quality factor that the search engine considers. It looks at a variety of different signals. Some refer to a single page, some to the entire site.

The goal of the search engine is to find out what people would classify as great content, as they would rate pages according to E-A-T criteria. With this in mind, evaluating a page's content against E-A-T criteria can help align it conceptually with the various signals the search giant's automated systems use to rank content. Then, quality is decided based on the expertise, authority and trustworthiness of the content.

The meaning of the Quality Rater Guidelines

The guidelines and their purpose are mentioned several times in the Google whitepaper. The point is to constantly improve the search. In 2017 alone, Google ranked more than 200.000 experiments conducted, resulting in approximately 2.Led 400 changes to search. Each of the changes was tested to ensure it was consistent with publicly available Search Quality Rater guidelines, which define the goals of the company's ranking systems and guide external evaluators who provide ongoing assessments of the algorithms.

The systems do not make subjective determinations about the veracity of websites, but focus on measurable signals that correlate with how users and other websites rate a website's expertise, trustworthiness, or authority on the topics covered.

Ranking algorithms are an important tool in the company's fight against disinformation. The ranking elevates the relevant information that the algorithms deem most authoritative and trustworthy over information that may be less reliable. These ratings can be different for each page on a website and are directly related to user search queries. For example, articles from a national news organization might be considered an authoritative response to current events searches, but less reliable for gardening-related searches.

The Google ranking system does not identify the intent or factual accuracy of a particular piece of content. However, it is specifically designed to identify websites with high indications of expertise, authority and trustworthiness.

For YMYL sites, the company assumes that users expect it to operate with its strictest standards for trustworthiness and security. When algorithms recognize that a user's search query relates to a YMYL topic, ranking systems give more weight to factors such as authority, expertise or trustworthiness of the pages presented as search results.

On a website, can the E-A-T concept be applied to multiple topics?

The E-A-T concept is topic-based. Theoretically, it is possible to show expertise, authority and trustworthiness in several areas. However, the more subject areas a website covers, the more difficult it becomes to do justice to each of the subject areas in terms of SEO. This is especially true if the topics are not semantically adjacent to each other. This follows from logical considerations: A doctor may have expertise in certain diseases and therapies. How trustworthy it seems however, if it gives at the same time Finanztipps and advises its readers to the topic age precaution?

Does an E-A-T rating drop over time?

Websites must constantly come up with new content, while existing content should be updated. It doesn't happen overnight that an E-A-T rating drops – it takes a few years. Here's how writers don't get pressured to publish new content several times a week. Nevertheless, webmasters should make sure that all current facets of a subject area are covered on the website.

Tips for a better E-A-T at websites

There are a few ways in which sites can benefit from the E-A-T concept and align their SEO to both improve their ranking and not lose visibility in the next update. We have put together some tips for you on how to stay on the safe side with regard to the E-A-T concept.

1. Make sure you have quality backlinks

As before, good backlinks are important for successful SEO. The search engine giant grants authority to pages that have backlinks from relevant websites or websites that are recognized in the industry. This does not mean that you should build backlinks indiscriminately. The important thing here is quality which is clearly above quantity. The best way is to create high quality content that people like to share. This is a signal for Google that your site is of high quality. Under this point also falls the long-term building of your brand. A good reputation also sends positive E-A-T signals to the search engine.

2. Concentrate on your area of expertise

For the search engine, an expert is someone who has a clear focus on a specific field of expertise – the egg-laying pillow is rather bad for a good SEO. As far as your content is concerned, you should always critically decide whether a topic fits your company and your website or not. Even if you (still) have little authority, you can compensate for this disadvantage by clearly specializing in one area.

3. Prove your expertise

In addition to the last tip, the author of the articles on your website is the following. Ideally, this is an expert in the specialty area of the website. An author description is important here, which shows which qualifications the author has and where he acquired them. Knowledgeable sources also prove that the author understands his craft and has a deeper knowledge of the subject matter he is writing about.

Especially if a page belongs to the YMYL area, the expert identification of the author must be clear, because the quality raters pay attention to it. In addition to a biography of the author, in which all relevant points are mentioned, a photo rounds off the information about him/her. You should update this content regularly to keep it current with the latest developments. If there is no expert in your team, it is worth to include one. But at the very least, the content should then be externally reviewed.

When an expert is absolutely necessary and when it also goes without certification, results from the specialist area. Sensitive content, such as medical or financial advice, should be secured by an expert. On the other hand, when it comes to personal experience with a particular thing or recommending vacation destinations, so does an everyday expert.

For example, according to the E-A-T guidelines, positive signals on a sales page include a good brand reputation and an extensive amount of high-quality content. Numerous positive user reviews and lots of helpful information about the product give further positive signals to Google. All these criteria lead to a high Page Quality Rating.

4. Build your authority on social media

Social networks help to increase brand awareness and build a good reputation, which increases authority. It's best to use different social media channels with high-quality content – taking into account where your target group is located. An engaging profile with lots of your own posts invites users to share. With a bit of luck, your content will go viral, at least some of it. You should also link your social media accounts on your page, as Google algorithms classify this as trust inspiring. A booster for your social media accounts are influencers. Make sure the influencers you collaborate with are also a good fit for your brand.

5. Let your users have their say

Your website should allow users to leave comments or share your product or service. Rate your service. Aside from having a positive impact on your page's ranking in search results, this also inspires confidence in new visitors to your website. Fear of negative comments and ratings should not stop you from using this option. The benefits far outweigh any isolated negative comments. You can refute negative comments from professionals or demonstrate the quality of your customer service to site visitors. This additionally inspires confidence in prospective customers.

6. Make your website as secure as possible

Technical security plays an important role for both users and Google rankings. This includes, for example, an up-to-date SSL certificate. If this is missing from your website, visitors will receive a warning that they are on an insecure page. This will cost you visitors and a good place in the top search results. Common quality seals increase trust in online stores, such as a "Trusted Shops" seal.

7. Ensure maximum transparency

Your website should always transparently communicate to visitors what its purpose is. All important information should be clearly labeled and easy to find. Users should be able to access the privacy policy, your T&Cs or contact information from all subpages with one click if needed. You should also present special certificates or awards that you have acquired over time and that are relevant to your website on your website. These have a positive effect on the quality of your website.

E-A-T is a marathon, not a sprint!

The E-A-T concept is not an SEO measure that delivers unbelievable results today, implemented tomorrow. It is a concept that is designed for the long term and will have its true effect in the long term. The guidelines are relevant for every webmaster who wants to optimize his website sustainably.

Optimization according to the E-A-T criteria is a worthwhile endeavor. This not only improves the ranking of a website in the Google search results. Appropriate measures also have a positive effect on the user experience. This makes it easier to keep visitors on a website longer. What you should pay attention to:

• If you run a YMYL site, you know if you need a real or everyday expert and have one on your team as well.
• Detailed information about the author, high-quality sources and relevant references are placed in a prominent position on your website.
• The content should be focused on your core topic and should be updated continuously. Visitors to your website receive up-to-date information on an ongoing basis.
• You have provided high quality backlinks from great sites.
• Also on social media, you regularly play on various channels with high-quality content that perfectly complements and rounds off your website presence. From your social media channels, link to your home page.
• Users reach you on your social media channels as well as through your website. There they have the ability to rate your products and leave comments.
• The purpose of your website can be clearly identified. It is clear from the website whether you are sharing information here or selling products.
• All important information can be found quickly on your website, such as your contact details, terms and conditions, etc.
• Your website offers the currently highest possible technical security level.

Frequently asked questions and answers from our customers

How to optimize a website to the E-A-T concept? Make sure that many high-quality backlinks link to your website. Define the area of expertise of your website and focus on it. Ideally, your website provides expertise on a single topic. Your expertise you prove by authors, who are from the subject and can prove this also. Their qualification is evident on your website. Parallel to your website, you're building a comprehensive social media presence: You're everywhere your target audience is spending more of their time.
On your website, users have the opportunity to have their say. They can rate your products or services or leave comments. The technical security of your website is up to date. You provide maximum transparency on your website. What are YMYL sites and why are they important to the E-A-T? YMYL stands for "Your money your life". These are sites where users can get information relevant to their quality of life or well-being. Google is particularly meticulous about the quality of such websites, and so the E-A-T criteria are very relevant to them. The following subject areas fall under YMYL: – Health and safety information portals – Finance information portals – Shopping sites (including online shopping portals) – News and current events – Government and law – Child education information portals – Specific groups of people and ethnicities. What is meant by a Quality Rater? A Quality Rater is a human reviewer who manually evaluates the quality of Google search results based on the company's guidelines. While the rater's rating does not directly affect a website's ranking factor, it does play a role in fine-tuning the algorithms. How important is the E-A-T concept for the SEO of a website?? The importance of signals resulting from the E-A-T concept for a website's ranking in Google search results has increased significantly since 2018. The company focuses on providing its users with quality search results that come from trusted and authoritative sources. The concept is especially relevant for YMYL websites. Which ranking signals play a role for the E-A-T concept? As far as this point is concerned, the search engine giant does not show its cards. However, one can assume that factors such as backlinks, search patterns or the behavior of the competition are included in the E-A-T rating.