Google has revealed that content is not scored directly for its Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) but that these factors do have an influence on search engine rankings.
When writing content, marketers are advised to demonstrate E-A-T to improve its quality and make it more relevant for searchers.
According to Ahrefs, this can be done by building more links, fact-checking articles and maintaining and updating content regularly so it does not become less useful or inaccurate over time.
Google has now stated that E-A-T is more of a “fuzzy” concept than something that can be assessed and scored, but that it still has an indirect influence on how its algorithm ranks pages.
Google’s John Mueller said marketers can’t simply aim to get to a score of “five or something” and be sure that they have done enough to reach an adequate baseline for E-A-T.
Instead, E-A-T is linked to the context of content and how deftly it is able to showcase expertise, authority and trust.
This can be frustrating, especially as the three concepts, while similar, have different criteria.
The first mention of E-A-T came way back in 2013 when Google included the acronym in its “Search Quality Rater Guidelines”, which is used by humans, not bots, to assess the quality of SERPs.
Since then, SEO experts have been advised to tailor content for E-A-T, though that can be difficult when it is not a tangible, performance-based factor.
Google’s Danny Sullivan has also said in the past that its systems use a “variety of signals” to gauge whether content matches “E-A-T as humans would assess it”.
For marketers, rather than trying to achieve a high score, they need instead to demonstrate expertise and authority through the general quality of the content they create and how it is optimised for SEO.
