[Guide] Understanding the Key concepts for Rep and TEA

Lately, I've been receiving some MP regarding this topic, and given the fact that the latest October patch has become widely spread and affected a ton of users within the forum, I've noticed that 100% of the sites have 1 thing in common: Serious Quality issues in different aspects.

According to the Quality guidelines that many users in the forum have been updating for several months, there are 5 main aspects that you should be considering in order to keep your site fresh and friendly against those latest Mr.G patches.

1. Reputation: essentially how the other sites talk about your site.
2. Trust: Does your site feel trustworthy when you look at it, or does it feel a random f***r trying to sell you some shit/install you a virus/or selling expert advice about something that could impact your quality of life (your sweat-earned savings or your health mostly) with an extreme poor copy written by a nonentity?
3. Expert: Please, put a face there. Don't sign your articles as "CryptoSuperPro". We all need to see that pal with his Armani's suite giving such financial advice or a white lab coat guy or gal giving some health advice (or Schwarzenegger when talking about those toxic supplements). Furthermore, that gentleman must exist, either being YOU or someone for real. Make it happen please, I hope you know how. If needed, build an alter-ego.
4. Authority: a.k.a. Domain Rating, quality incoming links in short
5. Quality: Finally, Quality of the content. AI poor copy, Spinners, Scraped content (duplicate content in general), etc… it's the perfect formula to be hit. But not all niches are equal. Generally, affiliates and generally illegal content are the worst targets. For example: Amazon/AliExpress scraped content, Play Store/AppStore/Younameit scraped content for APK. IMDB/RottenTomatoes… for film piracy, etc…

These are THE BEST methods to BE HIT by these updates:​

Rep-wise ​

Typically, reputation won't affect, except for those kinds of sites that are doing direct business with their customer base (like ecommerce and services sites, including Local SEO sites). Those sites prone to appear in sites like Trustpilot, G2, etc. are the ones that could be impacted by a REP hit. For this kind of sites, the fewer stars the better. Just forget about those review sites and you will guarantee your VIP seat to the wonderland of the visit desert

For general ad-niches like gardening, tarot and video gaming (just to name some), REP is more about a win-more strategy than losing ranks. In this kind of setups, Rep is the way to get to the top, but won't put you down.

Trust-wise: ​

1. Be a nonentity.
2. Do a download site (software, films,....) with a TON of ads. The best are the ones with the HUGE download button just over the real download button. The more deceiving is your site, the better.
3. The weirder your design, the better. No design at all is the best.
4. Try to avoid all the links regarding your privacy policies, your "who you are", etc… The more anonymous is your site, the better.
5. Put an infinite scroll so it's completely impossible to reach your footer with all those links
6. Overall, think on any possibility to make your site fishy AF. After you have finished your site, with all the ads set and all that, think to yourself: "Would I follow this advice, buy here, or download here?" If the answer is NO, then you have done a GREAT job trust-wise

Expert-wise​

1. As suggested above, the trick here is to remove all "about us" and more importantly, sign all your articles with the name of your site. It's critical that you remain the most anonymous as possible
2. After you have done your expert profile, leave it as it is in your site. Suddenly, any user will find out that the son-in-law of Bill Gates, a multi-millionaire visionary dude, has built the best financial advice site on the internet, but he doesn't even need a LinkedIn, or a Wikipedia bio site. Probably one of the most renowned doctors in the planet, I cannot find a single paper. Feels great to trust in a jackass, when I'm dealing with a grievous illness.

Authority-wise​

Most likely, the most effective methods, go to this site or this other one and purchase the product sold there. Then set or send your site and run the campaign for a couple of days. It will work wonders. You will skyrocket to the first position of the ranks. (Starting from below)

Quality-wise​

Finally, this is my preferred.

We all know that we mostly write for Mr.G. No one cares about the final users because the upper case g is such a lottery. Doing a Herculean effort to create quality content may probably be completely disregarded by those pesky robots, unless you are trying to keep your already ranked site status quo.

So basically, in this BH forum, we can all understand that trying to fool the huge G is our bread and butter. Problem is that the mastodon is constantly evolving and not understanding this, makes you the fool. Asking if spinners, AI-auto-generators, translated content, work, is worrisome because you clearly can't understand the underlying issue:
Sponge Bob is waiting for you in the deeps.



So quality is a tricky part: you can perfectly rank 1 even with the shittiest content for a huge competitive keyword. But the thing is that as soon as Google picks up with your trick, it will death sentence your site (specially if you have put all the eggs in one basket).

Are you using that wonderful AI content generator recently purchased from AppSumo, and 2K/day visits for such generated content? The sooner than the latter, one day, Super G will read it, vomit, and then put the awaited stamp in your domain.

Be aware of this: I'm not saying that I'm against shit content. In fact, I love it and I'm constantly trying to learn new methods and methods, in order to keep it up. But being aware of this, and clearly setting your expectations for the future, will relieve you from writing in the forum on "why this happened to me".

Conclusions​

When going down to Quality impacts, we must understand that Mr.G is a casino roulette, and once the ball drops in your square, you are done.

Don't ask yourself why your competitors have not dropped. The roulette keeps spinning and if they are executing the same practices as you, they will drop soon. Just wait for it.

Surely, there are certain strategies to recover that will be enough for a guide itself, but occasionally, the amount of time to recover could be higher, than the time you may invest on starting from scratch (because 99% of the times, recovery, means, starting from scratch, with a site that you already know has been pinpointed which kind of feel really disturbing)

I've probably forgotten some other elements that could be causing a drop in the rankings for current and future Goooogy updates. But mostly, these are the most common I've read over and over again, in the past few weeks. You are welcome to send me your site, specially a specific page that has been particularly hit (not the site's home which is useless).
When you receive visits to your site, they generally come to a specific sub-page and when you are hit by an update, what you see is how that specific page has dropped to 0 or almost 0 visits when it was receiving 1K+ visits month or day. This is the page I would prefer to check, not the whole site.

I would not answer via PM, but I will describe here the scenario and then suggest what could have happened (in case I discover and have not been already stated in this micro-guide). The idea of this is trying to understand and generate an analysis for new use-cases. I will @ Mention you in such case, when answer is provided.

Great guide, thanks a lot mate!

Thanks for the guide

Surprised by the low amount of likes this post got.

Many people found their sites and techniques in this I would say.

Great share OP

Nargil said:

Many people found their sites and techniques in this I would say.

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Most of the topics are common sense, but it is true that although its possible to fool the system, it's way better to set the expectations before starting.

I think this has been the ABC of BH but now Mr. G is clearly putting the things on top of the table in all possible scenarios now more than ever.

I predict that even authority will not work soon the way we know, since Google will be able to analyze reputation through context, not only through direct links. Still, similarly to links, we would be able to fool through fake context.

The only thing is that power of PBNs will change significantly, and those that have power only based on incoming links, with poor context, will be completely worthless (and much more difficult to calculate domain power considering it won't be just an interlinking metric, so probably tools like Ahrefs will become worthless).

I say that this will start to happen in no more than 2 years from now.

Good write up @SirLouen , thanks for taking the time, mate.
I have said to people for a while now, that you need to have proper author bios, unique images and ideally a good / solid social media profile to support your status as an expert, especially in YMYL or EAT type niches.

1. Reputation: essentially how the other sites talk about your site.
2. Trust: Does your site feel trustworthy when you look at it, or does it feel a random f***r trying to sell you some shit/install you a virus/or selling expert advice about something that could impact your quality of life (your sweat-earned savings or your health mostly) with an extreme poor copy written by a nonentity?
3. Expert: Please, put a face there. Don't sign your articles as "CryptoSuperPro". We all need to see that pal with his Armani's suite giving such financial advice or a white lab coat guy or gal giving some health advice (or Schwarzenegger when talking about those toxic supplements). Furthermore, that gentleman must exist, either being YOU or someone for real. Make it happen please, I hope you know how. If needed, build an alter-ego.
4. Authority: a.k.a. Domain Rating, https://www.blackhatworld.com/forums/seo-link-building.43/ in short
5. Quality: Finally, Quality of the content. AI poor copy, Spinners, Scraped content (duplicate content in general), etc… it's the perfect formula to be hit. But not all niches are equal. Generally, affiliates and generally illegal content are the worst targets. For example: Amazon/AliExpress scraped content, Play Store/AppStore/Younameit scraped content for APK. IMDB/RottenTomatoes… for film piracy, etc…

This guide has A LOT of EAT!

Would you reveal more on EAT?
I'm currently focusing solely on improving EAT, but I always feel that I'm missing something after having re-read 10s-20s papers and videos.

Thank you sir, do you have an example for EAT website?

SirLouen said:

Do a download site (software, films,....) with a TON of ads. The best are the ones with the HUGE download button just over the real download button. The more deceiving is your site, the better.

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I wonder how many times I have pressed the "Download" button for the ads by a mistake

Well said, A lot of the people around here don't get it and run to try and buy more and more AI generated blogs for you lol which I find it funny and sad at the same time. as you've said - just wait for it. :/ G rule the world

4440 said:

Would you reveal more on EAT?

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What do you feel you could be missing? You are going to always be missing something, because it's not 100% documented this. Most are some cues. Personally, I've mostly memorized the 300 pages guidelines I mention in the beginning, which is the only guide regrading this topic, the law book, the guidelines meant to be deceived in short. Basically, what attorneys do with laws. For every law there is a loophole, laws are meant to be broken.

SirLouen said:

What do you feel you could be missing? You are going to always be missing something, because it's not 100% documented this. Most are some cues. Personally, I've mostly memorized the 300 pages guidelines I mention in the beginning, which is the only guide regrading this topic, the law book, the guidelines meant to be deceived in short. Basically, what attorneys do with laws. For every law there is a loophole, laws are meant to be broken.

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Yeah, throughout the years I've read rater guidelines for several times with several editions. It's just, you know, they are all guidelines not steps. When you actually do things regarding EAT, there are few complete(perfect) examples to follow.

For example, the about us page. We know it's important. But what to include? Who we are, our team, roadmaps, etc. Which sections are the most essential part? We don't know. I have to check several sites and see what they do, like bankrate, investopedia, etc. Most of the time, the big tech can have a roadmap of 100 years but for a small niche site, it's impossible to fake. News, PR? They just buy them with big money. And I have to regularly go back to improve and edit my about us page when I find something new and useful. Usually when you edit one part, you have to edit other parts of the site to keep info consistent. It's a pain in the ass.

I know it's impossible to ask you to write a complete how-tos for building EAT for small-to-medium sites. I guess until some real whitehat gurus decides to share a step by step guide on EAT, I have to test in the dark.

You answered a lot of questions killing people inside.

4440 said:

I know it's impossible to ask you to write a complete how-tos for building EAT for small-to-medium sites. I guess until some real whitehat gurus decides to share a step by step guide on EAT, I have to test in the dark.

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Only set person identities. The rest is irrelevant. Be generous with identities, the most generous the better

SirLouen said:

Only set person identities. The rest is irrelevant.

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I hold the opposite opinion.
Person identities are far from enough. Many sites add author bio by default, and I see no significant benefits simply from adding personal identities.

I'm testing and adding other sections like "why trust us", "service page" sort of stuff and connects them.
I think those giant review sites must add "why trust us" part in every review post for a seo reason, possibly for EAT.

4440 said:

I think those giant review sites must add "why trust us" part in every review post for a seo reason, possibly for EAT.

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Maybe this is part of the process. But if you know how their neural is feed, you will understand why this is completely unlikely. Author is the only important element in all this process. Reputation is only gained through other contexts outside the site. Reputation within the site, is completely irrelevant, at least from how they feed the algo.
Although there could be a possibility that someone within the engine, decided to introduce some kind of demo data for this kind of specific aspect, it's 99.99% unlikely. Why would they use demo data for such an important aspect?

In fact, I'm not 100% confident that terms of uses/privacy policies/cookie things are also a thing on EAT. The only possibility with this, is the fact that most of this kind of pages are copycatted, therefore is effortless to be automatized.

Personally I'm into the minimum effort, because I follow my go wide rule because I don't think investing too much in a site is worthy, moreover knowing that Google is more unstable than the Venezuelan currency, so going too deep into their logic for just one site mean less eggs in other baskets.

SirLouen said:

Personally I'm into the minimum effort, because I follow my go wide rule because I don't think investing too much in a site is worthy

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I also believe in go wide strategy. And that's why I want to dig into "uses/privacy policies/cookie" and try to get the most use of them.
If the time cost for figuring out this stuff is $100, and each "uses/privacy policies/cookie" can bring me $5 value. I can cover the cost and benefit by easily scaling up to 20 sites.

The most important thing is that "uses/privacy policies/cookie", are all identical between sites. Once you figure out a template, you can copy-paste them to other sites within minutes, only changing the brand name.

SirLouen said:

so going too deep into their logic for just one site mean less eggs in other baskets.

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It's not for one site, I'm trying to figure out a general template and apply them on all sites.

Noob question. I don't want to show my face.
So, how do you build face for expert for your content website? Create fake profile with ai generated images?