to improve E.A.T for websites or entities

In recent years, the concept of authority, trustworthiness and expertise (E-A–T) has been a key factor in ranking keywords and websites.

Hyung-Jin Kim (VP of Search, Google) announced at SMX Next that Google has been using E-A-T principles to rank for over ten years.

What makes E-A-T so important

Kim stated in his SMX 2022 keynote:

“E-A–T” is a template that describes how we rate a site. It is applied to all queries and results. It is a part of everything we do.”

This statement shows that E-A-T is not only important for pages, but also for all keywords and topics. E-A-T seems to have a wide impact on Google’s ranking algorithms.

Google has been under a lot of pressure for years about misinformation in search engine results. This is reflected in the whitepaper “How Google fights Disinformation”, presented at the Munich Security Conference in February 2019.

Google is working to improve its search system so that it provides great content for each user’s search queries based on their context. This is where the quality raters are a key role.

“We need to get feedback from users every day about how our ranking systems and proposed improvements work. This is a key part of our evaluation process. What does it mean to “work well?” We make publicly available our rater guidelines which explain in detail how our systems are designed to produce great content.

Quality raters must evaluate their work according to E-A–T criteria.

They assess whether the pages provide the required information based on the query. Then they evaluate how authoritative and trustworthy the source appears to be regarding the topic. To evaluate things like expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness–sometimes referred to as “E-A-T”–raters are asked to do reputational research on the sources.”

It is important to distinguish between the document’s relevancy and the source’s content. Google’s ranking magic takes place in two areas.

It becomes evident when you look at statements made by different Google spokespersons regarding a quality score at both the domain and document level.

Paul Haahr, a SMX West 2016 presenter titled Google Works: A Google Ranking Engineer’s Story shared the following information:

“Another issue we were having was a problem with quality, and this was especially bad. It was between 2008, 2009 and 2011. We received many complaints about low-quality content, and they were correct.

We kept seeing the same low quality pages, but our relevancy metrics were always increasing. This is because low-quality pages can still be very relevant.

We thought this was the definition of a form of content in our worldview.

Our numbers showed that we were doing well, but we were providing a poor user experience. It turned out that we weren’t measuring the right things. We ended up defining a quality metric that directly addressed the issue of quality. Relevance is not the same thing.

It allowed us to create quality-related signals apart from the relevant signals , and improve them. If the metrics are missing something, ranking engineers should fix them or create new metrics.

(This is a quote from the talk on quality rater guidelines.

Haahr also said that:

John Mueller said the following during a Google Webmaster Hangout in 2016:

“We try to understand each page’s content and context to properly show them in search. However, there are certain things that we will look at the website in its entirety.

Understanding the type of website that this page is allows us to understand why we should be looking for it.

This is a situation where you can have both. The pages, as well as the entire site, are important.

There is a common misconception that Google has one site-wide number. This is not true. We consider many factors, and we don’t just look at one site-wide quality score.

We try to see a range of signals that are combined, some per page and some per site. But it is not the case that there’s only one number. It comes from five pages of your website.

Mueller emphasizes here that, in addition to the traditional relevance ratings, there is also a rating criteria that relates to the overall website’s thematic context.

This is a sign that Google considers signals to categorize and evaluate websites thematically. It is easy to see the proximity of the E-A–T rating.

The Google white paper, previously mentioned, contains several passages about E-A-T as well as the guidelines for quality raters.

“We are constantly improving Search. Google ran more than 200,000 experiments in 2017 that led to approximately 2,400 Search changes. Each change is checked to ensure it conforms with the publicly accessible Search Quality Rater Guidelines. These guidelines define the goals of our ranking system and guide the external evaluators that provide ongoing assessments of our algorithms.

“The systems don’t make subjective decisions about the truthfulness or credibility of webpages. They focus instead on measurable signals that correlate to how users and other sites value the authority, trustworthiness, and authoritativeness of a webpage covering the topics.

“Ranking algorithms are a powerful tool in our fight against disinformation. Ranking raises the information our algorithms consider to be the most trustworthy and most reliable over information that may not be as reliable. These assessments can vary for every website on the site and may be directly related to users’ searches. A national news agency’s articles may be considered authoritative for current events searches, but less reliable for gardening searches.

Our ranking system doesn’t identify the intention or factual accuracy of any piece of content. It is designed to identify websites with high expertise and authority.

We assume that our users expect us to adhere to the highest standards of safety and trustworthiness for these YMYLpages. Our algorithms will recognize that a query is related to a “YMYL topic” and give more weight in our ranking systems to factors such as our understanding of authority, expertise or trustworthiness pages we respond to.

This statement is especially interesting because it demonstrates how powerful E-A–T can be in certain situations and regarding events, compared to traditional relevance factors.

“To reduce visibility of this content type, we designed our systems so that authority is preferred over factors such as recency or exact match matches when a crisis is developing.”

You can see the effects of E-A–T in several Google core updates from recent years.

E-A-T has an impact on rankings, but it is and not.

In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion about whether E-A–T can influence rankings and, if yes, how. Nearly all SEOs agree that E-A-T is a concept or a type of layer that enhances the relevance scoring.

Google has confirmed that E-A_T is and not a ranking factor. does not have an E-A-T score.

E-A-T is a collection of signals or criteria that serves as a guideline for Google’s ranking algorithms to determine authority, trust, and expertise (i.e. quality).

Google speaks however of an algorithmic rating that is applied to each search query and result. This means that there must be data or signals that can be used to make an assessment.

Google uses manual ratings from search evaluators to train its self-learning ranking algorithms (keyword supervised machine learning), which are used to find patterns in high-quality content.

Google is now closer to meeting the E-A–T criteria in the quality rating guidelines.

Google may also consider these signals and criteria if the content or sources are rated as poor or high by search evaluators.

E-A-T, in my opinion, is composed of many origins:

Google uses an entity-based index like the Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Vault to rate sources, such as authors, domains, or publishers. You can bring entities into a thematic context and record their connection.

Google has tried-and-true algorithms such as Panda and Coati that can be used to assess the content quality of individual documents.

Google has confirmed PageRank as the only official signal of E-A-T. Google has used links for trust assessment and authority since over 20 years.

This infographic is based on official statements and patents from Google.

These signals must be distinguished by SEOs in order to positively influence EA-T.

On-page

Signals that are sent from your website. This refers to the whole content and not just the details.

Off-page

Signals from outside sources. These signals can come from external sources, such as audio, video, or search queries that Google can crawl.

Particularly important are links and co-occurrences between the name of the company, publisher, author, or domain, in relation to thematically relevant words.

These co-occurrences are more common than others, which means that main entities will likely have some connection to the topic or the keyword cluster.

Google must crawl these co-occurrences. Only then will you be recognized and included in Google’s E-A-T program. Google also considers co-occurrences of search terms as a source.

Sentiment

Google uses natural language processing for mood analysis to determine the mood of people, products, and company entities.

You can leave reviews from Google, Yelp, or other platforms here.

Google patents address this issue, including ” Sentiment detection for a ranking signal to reviewable entities.”

SEOse can draw concrete steps to positively influence E-A-T signals from these findings.

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Terms.

15 ways to increase your E-A and-T

Google’s E-A-T is a final attempt to adapt the “thematic brand positioning”, which marketers have used for centuries in order to establish brands.

A person will trust a service provider or product more often if they see them in that context.

Additionally, authority will increase if the entity is:

These repetitions help to retrain the brain’s neural network. As a brand, we are perceived as having thematic authority and trustworthiness.

Google’s neural network learns from this who is trustworthy and an authority for one or more topics. This is especially true for co-occurrences during the awareness, consideration, and preference phases.

Google associates more keywords with the larger keyword clusters you are in the customer journey. This link will be drawn if you are a member of the relevant group with your content.

These co-occurrences are possible, for instance, by:

There are many creative options, especially when it comes to off-page signals. There are no common SEO measures that can cause co-occurrence.

SEO professionals are becoming more and more the interface between technology, marketing, and PR .

Here is a list of concrete steps that can be taken to optimize E-A/T.

1. Your website should contain enough topic-relevant content

Google will see semantic topic worlds built into your website to show that you are an expert on the topic.

2. Link semantically-appropriate content with the main content

Each content must be connected to each other when building semantic topic worlds.

It is also important to consider the user journey. What is the next thing that interests you?

If they are clear and visible to Google and the user, outgoing links can be useful.

3. Collaborate and collaborate with experts such as reviewers, authors, co-authors, influencers, or co-authors

Google has already acknowledged them as experts through “Recognized”.

It is crucial that authors include references that Google can crawl in the relevant thematic context. This is especially important for YMYL topics.

It is preferable to have authors who have published long-term web-findable content about the topic. They are more likely to be recognized as an entity in the topical ontology.

4. Increase your content share on a particular topic

A company’s share of relevant document corpus is proportional to how much content it publishes.

This will increase the topic’s authority. It doesn’t matter if this content is published on your site or in another media. It is important that these content can be tracked by Google.

Guest articles on other authoritative media can help increase the content you have to offer. The more authoritative they are the better.

You can also increase the content of your website by:

5. Write text in simple terms

Google uses natural language processing for understanding content and mining data on entities.

Google is more comfortable capturing simple sentences than complex sentences. Google is more comfortable capturing simple sentences than complex ones.

6. For content creation, use TF-IDF analysis

To identify semantically related sub-entities, tools for TFIDF analysis can help you to determine if they should be included in content. This is a sign of expertise.

7. Avoid thin and superficial content

Google might devalue your website if it has a lot of superficial or thin content. Instead, delete or consolidate any thin or superficial content.

8. Fill the knowledge gap

The majority of the content you find online is a curation of information already included in many other pieces of content.

The best way to gain true expertise is to add new perspectives and aspects on a topic.

9. Respect consensus

Google defines knowledge-based trust in a scientific paper as the way content sources are evaluated on the basis of consensus information and popular opinion.

This is especially important for YMYL subjects (i.e. medical topics) as it allows you to rank your content in the first search results.

10. Make fact-based content and link to authoritative sources

All information and statements must be supported by facts and links to authoritative sources.

This is particularly important for YMYL subjects.

11. Transparency about authors, publishers, and other content and commitments

Although author boxes do not rank for Google directly, they can be helpful in finding out more information about an unknown author entity.

Advantages include an imprint and an “About us” page. Include links to:

As link text to your representations, entity names can be very useful. Structured data such as schema markup is recommended.

12. Avoid too many recommendation ads and advertising banners

Trust scores can be lower when there is aggressive advertising (e.g. Outbrain and Taboola ads).

13. Marketing and communication can create co-competition besides your website.

It is important to position yourself as an E-A-T brand thematically

14. Optimize user signals for your website

Analyze the search intent for each keyword. Search intent should always be matched by the content’s purpose.

15. Great reviews are easy to get

Publicly, people are more likely to share negative experiences with companies.

E-A-T can find this a problem as it can cause negative sentiment within the company. Encourage satisfied customers to share positive experiences.

Search Engine land – The first post How to Improve E-A-T For Websites and Entities appeared on Search Engine.

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