What's Google's #EAT and How to Optimize Your E-A-T in SEO

So welcome to a new edition, very special edition of Calling Mondays. Today I have a couple of amazing guests with me because we are going to talk about one of the hottest topics at the moment in SEO, E-A-T, or I don't know if I should say E-A-T. With me today I have Mary Haynes from Mary Haynes Consultancy. She's the founder and director of her own SEO consultancy. company, and also Lily Rae is Director of SEO at Path Interactive. And hello, Mary and Lily, how are you?

Hey, I'm well considering the circumstances, but yes, things are good here. Thanks, Aleyda.

Very, very happy to hear it. You, Lily, how's everything going?

Pretty good, all things considered. It's a little crazy in New York, but hanging in there. Thanks for having me.

Well, thank you for coming despite The corona craziness indeed, and the lockdown craziness, and today the update craziness too, right?

Exactly, yes. I know we were thinking, yeah, we were thinking that Google would hold off on major updates perhaps during the midst of coronavirus, but it'll be interesting to see what's gonna come of this.

It's gonna be interesting and potentially very hard to analyze, so we'll see what happens.

Indeed.

Trends that are completely off from what we tend to see during this time. You cannot do a typical year-over-year comparison already because the trend has changed in the last weeks already. Month over month also not necessarily. Let's see what happens. So the first question actually, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, right? Imagine that I am not an SEO and I come to ask you, what is it and why should I care about it?

So to me, E-A-T is Authenticity, really. And I think you could combine it with just being known. So, you know, that's obviously the authoritativeness. And I think if, you know, those of us who have been in SEO for more than, let's say, pre-Penguin, so, you know, before 2012, you could remember times where, you know, I could decide like, hey, I want to create this website on some topic I've never even, you know, I'm not an expert on, I've never heard of. But because I'm good at SEO, I can build links, I can do all the right things and get it to rank well. And throughout the years, and we can debate as to when Google started getting really, really good at this, but they started to find ways to make it so that the websites that Google was ranking for the most part are truly the best. And I know people will argue with that because they'll say, well, wait, this site is outranking me and they're not the best of their kind. But maybe they're seen as the most authoritative. And so Google has put together a bunch of many, many factors. factors that real human beings could connect to say, oh yeah, yeah, this is a business that I can trust or that knows what they're talking about. So to me, it's mostly about authenticity and Google trying to measure whether you're truly authentic, whether you're good for people or whether you're not.

Just to add to that, I think there's also this layer— this is kind of my interpretation of it— but there's this layer of like extra scrutiny that Google is using in its algorithms because of things like misinformation and just combating bad actors. Like, you know, previously, like Marie mentioned, it was really easy to spam the algorithm. And EAT is a new, like, spam filter in a way. By putting your name behind something and by associating your authors and your experts with, like, people that are putting their names out there and building a reputation for themselves and being trusted in their industries, you're holding websites accountable to providing trustworthy information, which I think is something that all the social media platforms are considering right now and focusing on.

Indeed, as you mentioned, like this additional criteria that sometimes is hard to measure or to evaluate in a quantitative way. It's not about content length or about the number of links that you have towards your specific pages, right? But more about the qualitative type of criteria that a user, from a user perspective, will take into consideration when deciding if that's really an information, a piece of information that you will rely on.

And I think it's important too that when you talk about an additional layer, that I think there's probably many, there's probably hundreds of layers that Google's engineers have access to when they're writing their algorithms. So, and I think that's where the controversy came over whether EAT was a ranking factor or not, because we're used to ranking factors being things like, oh, Google has said if you have a slow site, that's a negative ranking factor, even though it could be a minor thing. And we're used to things where if I have X, then Y is potentially going to happen. Whereas E-A-T, really Gary Ish from Google has said that it's a collection of millions of little algorithms, I believe is what he said.

Baby algorithms.

Yeah, yeah, was his word. Meaning that it's not just one thing. It's not like you can say, oh, but this site that's outranking me doesn't have an author bio, so they're failing their EAT. That's not the point, right? It's not a checklist that Google can go through and say, ah, you've checked this box, so you must be okay. It's so many things. So if you imagine, like, if we had this discussion, say, 10 years ago, and we said that Google was going to try to make it so that only authentic websites are ranking for— we didn't know what YMYL was back then, but for important queries, we would say, like, it's almost impossible to build an algorithm to determine whether something is trustworthy and authoritative enough, you know, but it's not, right? And so Google, we don't know exactly how they've done it, but they've told us over the years that their goals are to surface websites that have these components that they've outlined in mostly the Quality Raters Guidelines and other places as well as EAT. So I think that's where the confusion is, is it's not like— I have people ask me, how do I improve my EAT score? It's not like there's a score, right? So that's— it's a hard concept to grasp that it's not one single thing that we can say, ah, if I do this, I'm going to be seen as having high EAT by Google.

So do you believe that this is where the controversy comes? Because I know that there's this controversy regarding EAT because for me, these are reasonable criteria.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of reasons why it's controversial. And one of them is what we're talking about, which is that traditionally with SEO, we could Generally pin things down to specific tactics that we've done. Oh, I put the keywords in the title tag or the URL or like the H1 tag or like whatever traditional SEO was, you know. But now it's like this more qualitative thing where it's a little bit more subjective. And, you know, Google's quality guidelines, if you read them, you know, for many people they're agreeable, but for some people they're not. Like, for some people they have a different philosophy than what Google does. So when you're telling Quality raters that this is what high quality means, and maybe somebody fundamentally disagrees with the quality guidelines. That's going to create an algorithm that's somewhat subjective in a way. So I think that's one of the big controversies as well. It's like who is able to say that this is what high quality looks like, or that hate speech should be filtered out or something like that. So that's one of the reasons as well. But I do think more often than not, the controversies just come from people. Not knowing what the signals are that feed into EAT and debating about that and then extrapolating from the results, oh, I think that this is what the high-quality signals are on the site that's driving good performance and good EAT, but Google's not going to confirm that directly. So that leaves a lot up for interpretation.

So let's go and tackle, I think, something very important because as you mentioned before, sometimes this whole controversy comes because it's hard to pin out or to point out those specific signals that we should focus on to improve it, right? Based on your experience, I would like that you share specific actions that us as SEOs can do and should do to improve our EAT whenever we're working in an SEO process, and those that you think are fundamental whenever you tend to see that a client has lost their rankings after a core update, for example?

It's actually a tough question to answer because it's again the whole idea of E-A-T not being a single ranking factor means that there's not— it's not like you can just— it's not like page speed where we can say do these, you know, these 5 things and your site will load faster. And so our goals when we're trying to help a site that we feel has dropped in Google traffic because they're lacking E-A-T, Is to figure out where are the holes. So that's the first thing is, and the best guide that we have to do that with is Google's Quality Raters Guidelines. Very long read, but I find it fascinating. I don't know, Lily, how many times have you read the Quality Raters Guidelines?

It's printed out on my desk at work, so I kind of miss it right now. I don't know, I've poked through it, you know, so many different times.

Lily, you actually have other— Lily actually has a post like commenting on the changes from version to version, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. Well, and the first thing, as soon as we heard there was a Google update, you know, first thing I did was check, did the Quality Raters Guidelines change? Because that's really interesting, right? That, for example, in July of 2018, they changed the Quality Raters Guidelines. And all they did was they changed a couple little grammar things, but they added this one place where, in 3 words, safety of users, that they wanted to protect the safety of users. And so why would they go to all this trouble to republish guidelines just to put 3 words in it? So we took that and said, ah, we think the next Google update is going to in some way protect the safety of users. And sure enough, the sites that saw drops with the August 1st update, which we all remember was— we called it Medic in the SEO community.

Mm-hmm.

It went after bad actors in the medical community. And we saw sites that maybe had a very bad review profile would see drops in traffic. Or sites— it wasn't in that situation. It was later that we saw sites that overtly contradicted scientific consensus that potentially could be dangerous to people saw drops. So one of the things, the first thing I would say to do is to actually, if you've been hit by a Google update, is to spend time reading through the Quality Raters Guidelines and saying, can any this possibly apply to my site? And it's something that can be remedied. So one example would be reviews. Let's say that Google— that you have a problem in your business where people are complaining, and the number one complaint across the internet is that people can't get a refund. They can't figure out how to get a refund for your product. Well, the Quality Raters Guidelines have several examples where they say we're going to consider this a a low-quality website because there are complaints about not being able to get refunds. And so if that's a problem, you know, we could argue how could Google measure that. There are patents that Google has that shows that they can look at the sentiment of reviews. We don't know exactly what they're doing, but they're trying to figure out what the quality raters guidelines tell us is that a business that has an overt problem with people complaining is maybe not protecting the safety of their users, and maybe we shouldn't rank that as highly. So that's just one example. So how would you fix that? And we have had clients that have done a really good job at fixing a bad review problem. And it's— I think some, some people when they hear this, they'll think, you know, okay, we got to run in and we've got to get a whole bunch of people to give us good reviews. Well, that's a possibility, but it's got to be authentic, right? I mean, I think if Google's smart enough to determine this, they can determine whether it's one person that's suddenly written 1,000 positive reviews for you. But the first thing would be to fix the problem. If you have problems with people not being able to get refunds, you need to fix that problem. And that's part of why SEOs struggle with EAT, because as an SEO, I can't make my client be better at offering refunds. So that's part of the issue. As SEOs now, we're suddenly becoming business consultants and saying, look, the internet is having issues with your business because of this, and Google is catching on to this, and as a result, they want to rank you low.

I think that there's a very important important point of what you mentioned that as SEOs, I think that we struggle. That is not something that we'll go and crawl and fix directly in our website content or code, but it's actually advice that we need to give to our businesses or clients to tell them to change something at a business level or marketing level or communication level that goes beyond our reach, our direct reach. But if we think about it, this is how marketing consultants usually work, right? What is marketing? SEO is also part marketing and product too. It's part product, part marketing, part technical, and it's advising on improved things that touches and connects with the user experience, the search experience of the user in this case, right?

So I think Marie hit on it with the Search Quality Guidelines because there's so much in there. All the different things that I think we analyze from an EAT perspective kind of stem from that document. So there's hundreds of 160 pages of things to consider in there. But it, as much as it is an external thing where you do need to potentially make some changes to how your business operates, which is hard, I think there's a lot of things you can do on the site as well. So, you know, here's an example of things that we look at. So if the site is Your Money, Your Life and it talks about financial topics or health topics, and let's say you have your comment section enabled and you're allowing people to log on there and share their personal stories and maybe those stories are like extremely inappropriate or they use like swear words or things like that where it's kind of like unregulated. That's crawled, I mean potentially just depending on your setup, but that might be crawled content by Google. And now you have a YMYL page that's offering medical advice or offering financial advice that's like, you know, tons of comments are at the bottom that are creating just kind of like a low-quality experience. Those types of things are things that you can look at from an EAT perspective. to say, like, is this whole page, from what Google can see, offering high-quality advice? Or maybe, like, you get into the bottom of the page and you start to get really salesy in your informational content. So a lot of, like, the natural medicine doctors will push an agenda in the way that they write the content. And I think that that's something that Google's taken a lot of issue with, especially as it relates to, like, offering what should be objective information and advice. If it's too transactional or too salesy, that can get you in trouble.

Yeah.

So almost having like a third party or a neutral person read your content, I think, is a really good first step and say like, would you trust this if you didn't know me or believe in my business and you were just a random person? So that's something you can look at.

What would you say that is usually the top issues that you will tend to find again and again and again when you assess clients' websites?

Number one, again, is something that's very hard to fix is lack of authority. So, you know, in the past, if I was some website that was talking about, you know, cures or treatments for diabetes, it's— I maybe in the past could have outranked the Mayo Clinic and, you know, university sites and things like that. And that's challenging now, although that can be improved greatly by good PR. So that's where, you know, SEO and other avenues of marketing come in, that getting your brand more mentioned and more recognized by people can improve your authoritativeness. So, that's not all lost. And the other thing that we see— so, we review a lot of medical sites. And with the June 3rd update last year, we saw a number of natural medicine sites that just plummeted. And so, what we started to do was go in to some of the better— I mean, some of the natural medicine sites that dropped were ones that you and I would look at and go, like, oh, I wouldn't want to get information from this site. But some of them were relatively decent sites that were giving good information mixed with some kind of sketchy information. And so we've worked with them to trim out their content, to look at which parts of your content are maybe offering advice that would be contrary to what a traditional physician would offer, and to even change the title tags on these pages so that instead of saying, like, Here's 10 essential oils that are going to cure your cancer, to say, let's talk about essential oils. Are they helpful for cancer patients? And, you know, wording like that. So, and we've had quite good success with several sites that have done this that have dropped with usually the June 3rd update, and then with a subsequent update after making all these changes, see very, very nice gains. So there can be things that you can do to That would be improving the trustworthiness of your content.

Yeah, I would totally agree with that. I think I keep going back to deception as something that I see consistently throughout sites that have been hit. So whether it be, like you said, Marie, if you're saying that essential oils can cure cancer, I don't know if deception is the right word for that, but that's misleading and it's not entirely fact-based or evidence-based. But also just deceptive like SEO tactics. So if you do something like you auto-generate, you know, 5,000 pages and you're just replacing a few words on the page, especially if that's YMYL content, maybe you used to be able to rank for those pages in the past. But that type of thing at scale, I think, can create like systemic problems for your website and affect the trustworthiness of your site as a whole. So if you're trying to game the system and you're also trying to provide like YMYL services or products, I don't think that's a good combination.

It makes complete sense at the end of the day. If it is deceptive for the user, doesn't provide value, it's a bad experience, it shouldn't be able to rank as well. Have you found yourself to use any additional tools or different tools than the usual ones that you will tend to use in SEO audits or SEO content analysis? Are there any specific tools or features?

I have a couple that I've been using lately to try to get kind of fancy with like EAT analysis. So one thing that I did, and I talked about this when Maria and I spoke together at PubCon, was I've been using readable.io. So it's just one of many readability checkers which looks at the quality of the content from like a readability standpoint. So things like Flesch-Kincaid reading level, number of spelling errors, number of grammar Fake. How long is the content? How many paragraphs is it? Things like that. So looking at that data at scale across a lot of different articles, you can start to see trends about like what does good quality content look like from a numbers standpoint. That's one thing I've been doing. I've also been paying pretty close attention to structured data and the knowledge graph as it relates to EAT. So I published an article last week or two weeks ago about how structured data can actually play into your EAT. So things like just acknowledging who your authors are and who your organization is and when it was founded, who it was founded by, all these things produce the signals that I think Google is looking for as it relates to EAT. So structured data testing tool or custom extracts for structured data, stuff like that. We've been doing a lot more of that.

Perfect.

And that article was great, Lily. We referenced it a lot. And I think structured data is— it's a bit confusing because, you know, Google will say, well, it's not a ranking factor. But the more information you can give Google to say like, hey, this is our entity and we're connected, or these are our authors who are also the authors on this authoritative website here, that type of thing can help. We had a client a couple of years ago that did a rebrand and then in a Google update saw this massive drop. And it turned out that their rebrand just wasn't well recognized by people. from what we could see, again, with knowledge graph tools. So we use— I believe there's one by Carl Hendy that is a good way to search the knowledge graph.

I'm not sure about that.

Yeah.

And when we searched for information on this company, all we could see was their old branding. And so we just had them, number one, update their About page to make it very clear who their current company is, and then update in several places that the knowledge graph may draw upon that the company has rebranded. And they, again, they saw— they were a company that sold high-end furniture, and within— with the next update, they jumped from page 3 for their terms to number 1, 2, or 3 for almost all of their terms. And, you know, I mean, I don't want to take credit for that because I think eventually Google would have figured it out that this is the same company. But in doing things and adding structured data, that really helped I think, you know, Google to figure out, oh yes, this is that authoritative entity that we want to rank really, really highly. So yeah, the Knowledge Graph tool is one that we use a lot, just trying to figure out what entities has Google pulled from your site, because we really think a lot of what— how Google figures out E-A-T is in what— how you're connected in terms of entities. And another tool that is a lot of fun to play with is Google's got a tool to help you analyze images, and it will pull what entities they think are in the image. I love that. And that's very interesting. Yeah, if you throw your author's pictures in there and see, you know, does Google say, oh, we recognize this as a medical doctor, or not because you're wearing scrubs and a stethoscope, but that they can recognize, you know, they could look at a picture of Lily and say, Oh yes, she's connected with SEO. That's one of the goals, right? You want it so that Google's algorithms can say, oh, when we see this person, this person knows their stuff on this topic. So that image tool is a helpful one as well.

The same tool that they use otherwise, but in a different way in order to additionally align all the signals. And this, I believe that this is more about alignment in general to help Google and to give the right signals to Google about some particular content. To finish, what are topics that you think that are super critical that you wish to double down or clarify or to additionally mention here regarding EAT before finishing?

I'd like to say Google's blog post that they mentioned. They just tweeted about it yesterday when they said, hey, we're releasing a core update and here's all you need to know in this blog post. And we focused on EAT. When that blog post came out, it was controversial because Google had linked out to certain SEOs who had written on EAT. And in the midst of that controversy, I think people forgot that there's a lot of really good stuff in that post. There's bullet points there that are essentially Amit Singhal's 23 Questions for Panda, which were given to us many years ago. And these are questions that say— I don't have them right in front of me right now, but things like, would you trust this content Would you expect to see this content written in a print magazine? And there's bullet point after bullet point. So I would highly encourage people to just read that Google blog post. It's called something about Google on what you need to know about core updates. And those bullet points, if you can ask them in an unbiased way about your own site, then I think you'll see where your quality issues are.

Nice.

I think the whole controversy around DAT has been so blown out of proportion at this point where it's like people either love it or hate it. And like, that's such an unnecessary way of approaching it. Like, I think that we should all just think about like, you know, what, what is Google hoping to aim with this? Why is it in the blog post that they continue to share over and over whenever a core update happens? Why is it such a huge part of the search quality guidelines? And why is there so much evidence that this seems to be playing a role in what we're seeing with the outcomes of these algorithm updates? You know, instead of bickering amongst SEOs, I think it's an important thing to just learn kind of the fundamentals of how it works. I think that's where a lot of the controversy comes from, is people just like minimizing it or trivializing it or like not understanding it conceptually. But I think it's very important for professional SEOs nowadays to really learn the role that it's playing in the algorithms and to think critically when you're analyzing websites. You know, if you run a website through Screaming Frog, That's not the only thing you need to consider when it comes to doing good SEO. It's kind of this qualitative layer of thinking the way users think.

Exactly. That is what I was going to mention. I remember last year that I had the chance to interview the Google Master team members. Martin Splitt mentioned something that stuck with me and it makes total sense that at the end of the day, Google, what they try to do is say, simulate the user when accessing and seeing our content, right? When they go to our website today, well, there's a user agent there that is trying to simulate a device as the one used by real users. And then of course we validate many of the configurations that we know will play a role to make our content accessible and relevant and etc. And the same should be from an authority perspective, from a trust perspective, from an expertise perspective in order to give the best possible experience and value to the user. More and more, and this is the thing that we have seen in the latest years, how Google has become much more sophisticated. I think this is the additional layer that we don't by default tend to think about when we start because of course there's always so much to do, very basic sometimes from a configuration perspective, crawlability, indexability, whatever, that we already have so much to do. But when we finish with that and we really want to take our clients to the next level in very competitive queries, we cannot leave that additional layer out. That will be the one that won't only make Google to better rank us necessarily, but also we need to think about this is the additional layer of how we are going to make our clients, customers to actually convert, to be more satisfied and to buy more. Hopefully this video will change minds for those who still don't believe about this. And also hopefully that SEO have a little bit more influence business-wise because I think that this is where particularly also a lot of challenges come, right? How come you go and tell to your client or your boss, those reviews, they are fake, or change the wording there.

Yeah.

Are you misleading our customers? Things like that, right? Are more sensitive. Now hopefully you have also enjoyed today's share. Thank you very much, Mary. Thank you very much, Lily. I had a great time.

Thank you.

I learned a ton and hopefully also the audience too. And please, if you do have any questions, any comments, leave it here below. And remember, if you liked the video, like it, subscribe to the channel. Look, I'm becoming better at this of being a YouTuber now. And of course, if you want to learn more about it, Follow Mary, follow Lily, so you are always updated about it too. And thank you very much for today, and stay tuned for the next video that will be also really special. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.