What is Google EAT and How Does it Affect Your SEO

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What is Google EAT and How Does it Affect Your SEO

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Google is always updating their algorithms to help users find the best and most relevant content. You need to keep up with these algorithm changes or your SEO will suffer. Google’s latest update, EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), is a major change that affects how you surface your website’s content to users. On top of that, it also influences how Google indexes your site. If you want to stay ahead of the game, then this blog post is for you. We’ll explore the new Google EAT.

What is Google's EAT

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What is Google's EAT?

EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This is an update to Google’s algorithm that was rolled out in 2019. It looks at the authority of the site and the expertise of the authors publishing on that site to determine how your content will rank. With EAT, Google will prioritize content that comes from sites or authors with expertise. Experts could be authorities in their field or simply people with a lot of knowledge in a certain subject. They also have the ability to create content that is trustworthy. 

Google likes to see websites with a lot of trust and authority. It’s another way they want to make sure their users are seeing the most accurate and relevant content. Google EAT also looks at how trustworthy a website is. Websites with content that has been reviewed or has a lot of references and citations will have higher trustworthiness.

Is EAT important?

Well, Google EAT can be important for all queries but some more so than others. If you’re searching for pictures of cute dogs, then EAT probably doesn’t matter because the topic is subjective. EAT can be important for queries if you’re searching for the dosage of some drugs, financial tips, or other important topics.

These important topics are called by Google as YMYL topics (Your Money or Your Life). YMYL are topics that could potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety. If your site is built around a YMYL topic, then EAT is crucial.

Laptops and person writing on paper

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How to Evaluate Google EAT?

Even though it seems similar, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness are three different concepts. So three of them were evaluated independently.

Expertise

Expertise referred to in this context is having high knowledge or expertise in a specific field. Mainly, the expertise aspect is evaluated at the content level, not at the entire website. In other words, Google will prioritize content created by people who are experts in their fields.

For YMYL topics, the evaluation will be based on formal skills, qualifications, and the educational track and experience of the content creator. For example, a lawyer will be more qualified in creating content about law compared to us. Meanwhile, for non-YMYL, expertise is evaluated from relevant experience or “everyday expertise”

Authoritativeness

When a website is seen as the go-to source of information about a topic, that is authority. Authority is all about reputation, particularly among other experts and influencers in the industry.  To evaluate the level of authority, raters will search a website to get information about its reputation, including reviews, recommendations, articles or other credible sources.

It’s crucial to comprehend that authority is a relative notion. Despite the fact that Elon Musk and Tesla are reliable sources of information on electric vehicles, they have little to no authority in SEO. Furthermore, certain individuals and websites are particularly authoritative on certain subjects. For example, Ed Sheeran official website is the most authoritative source for its lyrics.

Trustworthiness

Trustworthiness concerns around the legitimacy, transparency, and accuracy of a website or content. Raters will look at several aspects of evaluating trustworthiness such as contact information, or a statement of liability for the publication of content.

Raters will also assess the level of accuracy of the information listed on a page or content. That way, citing references and embedding external links are important things to do. Remember that trust is a relative notion. You can’t trust a website or a person to be reliable in all areas. We provide reliable information on Digital Marketing, but not on cooking.

Ranking illustration

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Is EAT a Ranking Factor?

For something to be a “ranking factor,” it has to be something tangible that a computer can understand and evaluate. Something must have a clear quantitative value so that it can be understood and evaluated by a computer. The number of backlinks from a website is one concrete example.

Google can crawl a website to count the number of backlinks it has. From the crawl results, the ranking of search results will then be determined with websites that have quality backlinks occupying the top order. However, this is not the case with Google EAT which are human concepts so they are difficult to standardly evaluate by a computer.

In solving these problems, Google implemented the following solutions:

  • First, Google’s Search Engineers designed algorithm changes aimed at improving the quality of search results.
  • Second, Quality Raters compare the search results with the application of the new algorithm and the search results without the application of the new algorithm. The results of the comparison will be accepted by Google as feedback from the search results.
  • Third, Google uses feedback from Quality Raters to determine whether a proposed algorithm change has a positive or negative impact on search results. Algorithm changes will be implemented if they have a positive impact.
EAT conclusions

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Conclusion

From the explanation above, it can be concluded that Google EAT is an important factor to consider for your SEO efforts, especially if your website touches on YMYL topics.

Thus, our review about Google EAT to running your SEO. If you still have a questions about the SEO of your business website, Pixie Digital a digital marketing agency from Bali ready to help you through SEO service.

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