How does Google estimate authority and expertise?

Hey all, I've been getting more into understanding EAT lately. I figured it was a 'sham' in the way that mobilepocalypse was anything but a 'pocalypse' and 'site speed' in most cases is one of the weakest ranking signals. There might be more to EAT though and I'm trying to figure it out.

I've had some success linking authors to their author pages (it was previously linked to a forum profile) and I've seen the difference a contact page and about page can make. What other signals does Google use for EAT?

Can someone first explain what is EAT ?

CredibleZephyre said:

Hey all, I've been getting more into understanding EAT lately. I figured it was a 'sham' in the way that mobilepocalypse was anything but a 'pocalypse' and 'site speed' in most cases is one of the weakest ranking signals. There might be more to EAT though and I'm trying to figure it out.

I've had some success linking authors to their author pages (it was previously linked to a forum profile) and I've seen the difference a contact page and about page can make. What other signals does Google use for EAT?

Click to expand...

Google doesn't do that directly.

You'll rank like any normal website until a manual reviewer will take a look at your website.
They will usually first check the author's name on popular social media.

If the articles are on the name of the website, they will run checks on the website, like "website review", check YT, FB, etc pages and check what the hell were they posting, any opinions, etc.

If everything checks out, the manual reviewer will assign a grade from High Quality to Low Quality, or somewhere in between.
If there's no EAT, you'll get LQ and rankings will drop.

This is a manual process, and I have yet to find the regular basis on which the reviewers visit your particular website, page, etc.

@Sartre bothered to drop a link two times for the quality guidelines these reviewers check your website.
Check his threads, pure knowledge.

lotsofmoney said:

Can someone first explain what is EAT ?

Click to expand...

E-A-T means Expertise - Authority - Trust and it's basically google asking you to be a real expert in what you're writing about or else you can go to hell. In other words, another proof that google hates the masses and only sides with the ultra privileged because only a select few can be experts in their fields. The real experts in a field don't do SEO, they are offline most of the time doing their expert shit in their expert field.

EAT is all about becoming completely naked before google, giving them all info about yourself, your family, your ancestry, and even about your unborn kids and nephews. Google wants to know what you eat, when, how much you sleep, where you go and what you do, what consistency your poop was, how many times you breathe in a day, your fingerprint, your DNA code, and everything else that science can understand (yes, my passion for hating google - and for ultra rich pervert voyeur companies in general - is undying).

Anyway, I kind of went overboard with my lamenting, but here's a thread that explains what EAT entails, from a business perspective:
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/how-to-increase-websites-e-a-t.1408725/

Here’s an example from Google that highlights what they mean by E-A-T:

“High E-A-T news articles should be produced with journalistic professionalism – they should contain factually accurate content presented in a way that helps users achieve a better understanding of events. High E-A-T news sources typically have published established editorial policies and robust review processes.”

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At a high level, there are three primary components listed in the Google search quality evaluator guidelines:

The expertise of the creator of the Main Content.
The authoritativeness of the creator of the Main Content, the Main Content itself, and the website.
The trustworthiness of the creator of the Main Content, the Main Content itself, and the website.

Ensuring accurate, truthful, useful information

Essentially, E-A-T is one way Google tries to ensure that it returns accurate, truthful, useful information to searchers. Anyone can create a website and publish whatever they want on it. You don’t have to be a doctor to start a medical information website or have a finance degree to write about investing.

Of course, in one sense this is a good thing. However, it also presents a problem for Google. People make important decisions based on what they learn from search results. So, Google aims to ensure that those decisions are based on the most trustworthy information possible.

Therefore, Google considers the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of the individual creator of page content, the content itself, and the entire website. In Google’s eyes, a thorough medical article written by an experienced doctor on the Mayo Clinic website is much more valuable than a random blog post dispensing unverified medical advice.

There is no one answer to this question as Google's algorithms are constantly changing and evolving. However, some possible methods that Google may use to estimate authority and expertise include looking at a user's past search history, the number of times a user has clicked on a particular result, and the number of other users who have also clicked on that result.

tazarbm said:

it's basically google asking you to be a real expert in what you're writing about or else you can go to hell.

Click to expand...

Bruh. I almost spit out my drink!

Toz said:

Bruh. I almost spit out my drink!

Click to expand...

is that good or bad?

This is what the manual reviewers use to evaluate sites.

https://easyupload.io/b0ztvw
172 Page PDF explaining how to train the evaluators.

Enjoy..

Alexion said:

Google doesn't do that directly.

You'll rank like any normal website until a manual reviewer will take a look at your website.
They will usually first check the author's name on popular social media.

If the articles are on the name of the website, they will run checks on the website, like "website review", check YT, FB, etc pages and check what the hell were they posting, any opinions, etc.

If everything checks out, the manual reviewer will assign a grade from High Quality to Low Quality, or somewhere in between.
If there's no EAT, you'll get LQ and rankings will drop.

This is a manual process, and I have yet to find the regular basis on which the reviewers visit your particular website, page, etc.

@Sartre bothered to drop a link two times for the quality guidelines these reviewers check your website.
Check his threads, pure knowledge.

Click to expand...

https://sites.google.com/view/raterhub/

thanks!

I think Google is pretty inaccurate when analyzing the content quality. It simply doesn't know which content is better.

Therefore, it has a lot of factors like page time, ease of accessibility, content formatting, related content on the page etc. to figure out what is the article about.