High page loading speed, excellent inbound links and optimal behavioral factors do not guarantee high site if EAT factors are not taken into account.
What is EAT? How to optimize your site? Recommendations for implementation in practice.
Let’s deal with the questions further.
EAT stands for a group of signals expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, in translation – expertise, authority, trust.
What data indicate the relationship between factors and site positions in search results? List:
What is the purpose of thedocument Search Quality Rater Guidelines? The guide is intended for assessors. The expert evaluation of the sites is carried out in accordance with the stated instructions.
What are the reasons for EAT? There is too much information on the Internet low quality.
In order to minimize costs, many sites host low quality content. Sometimes content is just bought. For example, on article exchanges. The price for content is low, and therefore the quality of the content is low.
Creating truly quality content requires experience and content costs. On top resources, experts receive about $ 25,000 per article.
The situation was greatly worsened by optimizers who have learned to improve text factors by using services for analysis of the text, and also learned how to optimize behavioral factors by attracting motivated traffic from external services.
The signals were too noisy, and, as a result, the quality of the result of working out the algorithms for searching for relevant content significantly decreased.
Initially, EAT was applied only to topics like Your Money or Your Life.
All sites that affected people’s eligible for the YMYL criteria happiness, health, finances, and safety were. List of topics:
Google:
Some types of pages or topics could potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.
We call such pages “Your Money or Your Life” pages, or YMYL.
Overall, if the site falls under important topics, the impact of EAT on rankings is significant.
The trend shows that signals have begun to be used in other topics as well. This means that almost all sites should be optimized.
The exceptions are sites without copyright content and projects of entertainment topics.
Yes, but the statement needs clarification.
In the case of external links, there is a PageRank value.
In the case of EAT, the factor does not have a specific value, but it has a set of characteristics.
The search engine algorithm is capable of finding and analyzing EAT features.
The result of the algorithm’s work is a conclusion on whether the content matches the EAT features.
The meaning of the approach. Briefly:
Google:
Is EAT a ranking factor? Not if you mean there’s some technical thing like with speed that we can measure directly.
We do use a variety of signals as a proxy to tell if content seems to match EAT as humans would assess it.
In that regard, yeah, it’s a ranking factor.
Ideally, a robot should work on the documentation, but the machine does not process the evaluation criteria at an abstract level.
For a search engine, the advantage of EAT lies in the difficulty of manipulating the signal.
The difficulty in optimization lies in the following – if there is no evidence in the real world, then there is almost nothing to optimize on the site.
Search engine optimization should be started in advance, otherwise there is a risk of falling under the YMYL filter. Sanctions are imposed on sites that have failed to confirm their expertise, reliability and credibility.
How to optimize site pages for EAT?
We have 3 directions:
Let’s briefly deal with the particulars. There are many myths on the internet. Sometimes there are recommendations that have nothing to do with the EAT, such as increasing the speed of loading the site. The loading speed does not affect the authority of the site in any way. Few people understand the difference between expertise and authority.
Provided by the expertise of the author of the main content zone.
How to improve? First, you should add an author page to the site, but just adding a photo and name is not enough. It is optimal to carry out the markup of the author, it is explained in more detail by the link – The attribution factor in SEO. How to implement on the site correctly?
Signs of expertise should be indicated on the author’s page. For example, educational diplomas and the like. The facts should indicate the author’s expertise in the topics for which the content was created. The presence of scanned documents is encouraged. It is required to publish all significant factual evidence confirming the author’s expertise.
For ease of understanding, for example, in my case, the documents have a diploma in computer networks and systems, certificates in layout, programming and analytics.
Expertise is demonstrated within the site.
Authority is demonstrated outside of the site.
The authority factor is checked by:
The concept of authority is related to the concept of citation index. More mentions on authoritative resources are better.
How to increase the authority of the site? By optimizing signals on external sites. The correct direction of work is:
How to increase the authority of your content? The authority of the content is provided by external links. Accordingly, the authority of the content is increased by posting external links to the page.
How to increase authority author’s? It should be pointed out that the author is a recognized authority in the niche. The author can declare his expertise on the site, but not be so. A test for falsity is required. Authority confirms the declared expertise. It is not enough to have a diploma or be a speaker at conferences. Ideally, the author should be a recognized authority. There should be activity not only within the site, but also outside. Both external links and taken into account textual mentions are.
The trust factor is checked by:
The credibility of the author is improved by posting a photo, extended information about the author, links to social networks.
The credibility of the site is improved through the creation of a company page, extended company information and reviews. The correct directions for the work of external optimization are:
The correct directions for work within the site are:
credibility is Content improved through placement outbound links to reputable sources.
The search engine has a system check fats, which means that for news sites it is mandatory to check the facts.
What to do if the factors are not worked out at all? Obviously, the best option is to work on the EAT systematically. While the author does not have a high level of authority, it makes sense, in addition to the author, to add to the page an authoritative expert who has checked the content. As a result, the content is written by a simple author, but reviewed by an expert.
Authorship should also be taken into account when placing guest posts and materials on outreach.
EAT affects the promotion of sites in search results. The algorithm is trained based on expert estimates. As a result, the layout of the content is improved in automatic mode.
Content, author, site is subject to assessment.
The search engine improves the quality of search by analyzing the EAT. There is a trend in the spread of the influence of EAT on most topics.
Work on improving the signs of expertise, authority and trust has been done on few sites.
The main problem with EAT is that high-level professionals are often introverts. On the contrary, at conferences, speakers often jump with sawdust in their heads. There is no time for real experts to attend various conferences and there is no point. But in order to promote, certain company representatives should be popularized, for example, through publications in reputable media.