Actionable strategies on improving E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trust)

Okay, so this update is driving me mad, I need to figure out what went wrong on my site. I spend a lot of time doing research and writing in depth content and reviews on products in my niche. Now I am outranked by shithouse websites like Quora and very obvious scraped/spun content.

A lot of the "experts" in the SEO community all seem to parrot this whole thing about EAT, and then provide vague advice on what to do. The real answer is that they know fuck all about how to fix ranking drops from the update.

But I figure I'll give it a shot with some things that could potentially make a difference over time.

• Adding in a better bio and "about" page, although it is already very hefty and explains my experience and credentials in my niche.

• Removing words like "very", "somewhat", "extremely", "can seem" etc (these words can make it seem like you are unsure what you're explaining, when it really just gives leeway to your text. E.G. If you were talking about the benefits of lifting weights, you might mention "squatting is a very good way to add lean muscle mass, not to your legs but to your entire body". If you were more sure about it, you would write that it IS the best way to add muscle to your body. (crude example of what I am talking about).

• Shorten content from typically 3000-5000 words (I've noticed a lot more brief content ranking highly, rather than actual authoritative articles). I'll be removing every last sentence that isn't helpful.

• Add in a few new articles & build some higher quality links (site hasn't been updated for quite some time, but it has survived a number of "quality" algorithms in the past, including Panda, Penguin, etc).

If anyone has anything to add, feel free to post below.

I think the latest update addresses a number of things (purposefully Google always muddies the water). However, the theory that Google is pushing sites with higher EAT to the top could be partially correct.

A newcomer to the top 5 for a keyword I track is showing what I would call expertise based on their content. They have come from out of nowhere.

Articles are not written by any specific person with expertise. However, the topic is legal, and the site is a child site of a law firm. That is very clear. However, there is no "About" page or promotion of author credentials.

There aren't many links, but a good proportion of them are from legal news related websites and use brand anchor text. The head keyword is in the domain name (it has a PMD), so to some extent, brand anchor text is also keyword anchor text.

The reason I reckon they rank strongly is because of the depth of topic coverage. They have a 40 page site devoted to one aspect of the law. The content is very well siloed but the word counts are not big. Each page is clearly about a certain topic, and covers that topic well without being verbose. Some pages are only 300 words. Those pages are indexed.

This ties in with my other experiences of gains during this update. It is by no means the only thing I have seen (user engagement seems to be important as well for other sites but I can't imagine its high for this one), but if showing expertise has become more important, the way to do it seems to be to cover a subject in depth and have a link profile that reflects that.

I think silo-ing is one of the things I may have overlooked when I built the site. I just interlinked articles willy nilly, and now that I think about it, it could be potentially confusing to Google. I thought they were much more clever with how they viewed content and websites, but after this update it seems like narrowly focused sites did seem to get some improvement. E.G. Quora that has specific answers for queries, even though the "authors" are usually just marketers trying to sell their own shit or people who provide some answer, expert or not.

I think I will also be looking for some links to drop to my site, and see what happens after i publish a bit more content (make it seem a bit more natural).