Welcome back.
This is John Locke, and today we're talking about what everybody gets wrong about EAT.
Now EAT is an acronym that stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness.
This is a phrase that is mentioned over and over in the Google search quality rater guidelines.
Now the quality search raters, they are human individuals, contractors, Google employees
to rate certain search results.
Now what their main purpose is basically to help train up the artificial intelligence,
Google's rank brain, part of their algorithm.
It's training up the AI.
What they do is they give feedback on the results that they're seeing using a set of
criteria and they're supposed to judge.
Now one of the phrases like I said in these publicly available guidelines, which were
just updated yesterday is EAT, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness.
Now in the SEO community, a lot of people have twisted this up and they've really misinterpreted
what this actually means.
Now the EAT really matters on sites what they call Your Money or Your Life, YMYL and this
would be sites that give information or advice that has a direct impact on your well-being
like health, finance, those sorts of things.
This is where EAT is most critical.
Now on other sites, it's not as critical but that does not stop the SEO community and many
people from selling things like EAT audits from giving advice on EAT like put a bunch
of logos on your site, put author bio boxes on your site and your EAT signal will improve.
Now this is the part where everybody is getting this wrong about EAT.
EAT is not about an individual author.
EAT is about the track record of the site, giving factual information and having people
satisfied with the results that they're getting, okay.
EAT is not about one person or an author.
If you remember the video that we did a while ago where this was a question in another SEO
forum, it was a site selling dental equipment, orthodontics equipment, these sorts of things
and they hired a dentist to write content for this site because they figured this guy
is an expert.
He has EAT.
This will help raise up our entire site if we get content from this one guy.
The problem is they were an e-commerce site up until this point and they did not have
a track record for authoritative content.
This is why the one author does not bring up the site, the site brings up the author
and I see this question, I see this misrepresented every single week in SEO forums, in Facebook
groups, in Slack channels, all around people making podcast about it, people selling audits
about it and it's all completely wrong.
If you are a non Your Money or Your Life site, the EAT is basically going to start at a default
of medium and this is one of the changes that Google made in this document.
In a lot of places, they changed any references to EAT to page quality because I have a feeling
that the page raters were looking for authority where it was not necessarily and not valuing
the actual quality of the main content of the page.
Now keep that in mind, main content, quality, skill, talent.
These are things that are in there and I will link to the original document.
I will link to some of the articles that came out about this so you can reference it and
look at it yourself, but for a non Your Money or Your Life site, non-health, non-finance
type of site, what these quality raters are supposed to be looking at and what you should
be doing as a site owner is looking at the actual content quality of that particular
page and of your site as a whole and what the actual Google document says is you can
evaluate the talent and skill of the main content of that page on its own.
Now if you are a finance or a health site, then Your Money or Your Life comes into play
and what it's going to be looking at, what Google is going to be looking at is the track
record of your site for factual information.
Like in that video before, this guy that was trying to rank for content for dental equipment,
this is why you're getting outranked by brands like Crest or Oral B or WebMD or any of these
other ones that have a long history of providing factual, trustable information.
In the actual Google document, the quality search rater guidelines, the example that
Google changed when they talk about the actual EAT is they used the Your Money or Your Life
site Visa, they used Visa, the credit card company as an example of saying they have
high EAT, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness because they've been around and they have
a track record.
Now this is a continuation of the same principle that they talked about in 2008 when they said
that brands are there to sort out the cesspool when they have 2 million post being written
every hour that are appearing on the internet, it's really hard to assess the EAT of every
single one so what they're going to do is they're looking at long term brands, long
standing brands that have already earned that trust, those ones are going to be trusted
above just some knick-knack website that appeared last month.
If you're not a brand, the EAT, you can pretty much assume is going to default to medium
so unless your site has already established a long term track record, then that is something
that you need to start doing right away.
I will give another example of this as well, why it is not one author or one expert or
one freelancer that you need to worry about through EAT, it's your site as a whole.
The site brings up the author.
The author doesn't bring up the site.
This is why people rent experts or they worry about their freelancer writer but the truth
of the matter is, I want you to look at a site like Neil Patel's site.
Neil Patel is a pretty famous dude in SEO, in marketing but most of his stuff is ghostwritten
and this is pretty much a publicly open secret, everybody knows it.
The Google knows it as well, but his site, because so many people link to it and so many
people find what they're looking for, they appear to be happy with it or they get user
engagement signals that people are happy with the main content of those pages, they continue
to rank.
Now it's not actually Neil Patel writing most of this stuff, but it's his ghostwriting team.
Doesn't matter, the EAT doesn't matter.
It's his site.
The site is a track record.
I want you to keep this in mind, the authority part of this whole thing, authority, EAT,
the A, the authority is links.
If nobody's linking to a particular site or a particular page, then it probably doesn't
have a lot of authority.
It's really that simple.
It's not about putting up a bunch of logos.
It's not about linking to all the different places where you commented or you wrote an
article or you run a podcast or you made a video, it's about those sites linking to you.
It's about the track record of your site and then all these other sites talking about you
for a long period of time.
Google does not have a list of names where they have experts on one side and then non
experts on the other.
A lot of people imagine it to be like this where I'm an expert because I say I'm an expert
and I've been around.
The fact of the matter is if there's not easily traceable proof of that, meaning if you haven't
been talking about the same things on your website for a long time, if people have not
been linking to your site for a long time, then that is not proof.
Google does not have a list of like these people are factual experts because they say
they are.
It's not a list of experts on one side, non-experts on the other.
It's basically they're defaulting to the position of, if this site has got links and has a long
track record of providing factual, helpful information and we're getting the user engagement
signals from those pages that people are happy with what they're finding, then we're going
to say that the expertise of that page is high.
The authority is the links.
The trustworthiness is all the other signals out there as far as reviews, reputation and
how your site is set up, but it's not just throwing up some logos.
It's not just putting an author, bio box on there.
Google is not scanning for a certain author's name to give your site a lot of authority.
It's not about just getting certain names on your site.
Your site is the point of authority that you need to be working on.
I hope that all makes sense.
I'm going to link up these documents below and I encourage you to go check it out.
These are the things I believe that a lot of people are getting wrong about EAT.
They're looking at the wrong signals.
they're looking for the wrong things and they're selling philosophies of things that frankly
Google is not as sophisticated as you think it is as far as determining, like here's a
list of all the people on earth and these people are experts, these people aren't and
these people are somewhere in between.
It's not that sophisticated.
It doesn't have like everybody on earthy figured out like you think they do.
It really comes down a lot of the time to links and track record.
I hope that makes sense.
My name's John Locke.
My business is Lockedown Design and SEO.
I'm here publishing videos every single day.
I encourage you to check it out, subscribe and all those things.
Until next time, peace.