SEO

E-E-A-T Is the New E-A-T. What the New “E” Means for SEO

Published

9 months ago

March 6, 2023

E-E-A-T Is the New E-A-T. What the New “E” Means for SEO

E-E-A-T (or Double-E-A-T) is a concept used by human quality raters to evaluate Google’s search ranking systems. Originally, it consisted of only three factors (E-A-T). But in December 2022, Google added the criterion of “experience” to the concept.

So according to Google, some types of content need to be produced with firsthand experience to be trustworthy. Here’s what that means for SEO.

No, at least not directly. Nothing has changed here since the original concept of E-A-T:

As a reminder, these guidelines are what are used by our search raters to help evaluate the performance of our various search ranking systems, and they don’t directly influence ranking (source).

Google’s general idea here is to reward (rank higher) quality content that comes from trusted sources. So the messenger is at least as important as the message.

Experience in the Double-E-A-T means firsthand or life experience in the topic.

This means that Google will aim to “reward” pages where the author has actually experienced the topic they are writing about. For example:

For an iPhone review, the author must have actually used the product.
For a guide on the best jazz bars in San Francisco, the author must have actually visited them.
For an overnight oatmeal recipe, the author must have actually made the dish.
For an article on how to help people mentally cope with an illness, the author must have actually gone through it personally and/or helped other people.
For a guide on how to be successful in business… you get the idea.

Regardless of the topic of the page, the most important out of all criteria is the “T,” or trustworthiness. Other criteria, such as expertise, authoritativeness, and experience, are there to help determine whether the page is trustworthy (QRG, page 26).

You can think of the other criteria as pillars for establishing trust.

Trustworthiness is the most important in E-E-A-T

Then depending on the topic, other criteria come into play. For some topics, experience may be more important than others.

You should consider the purpose, type, and topic of the page, then ask yourself what would make the content creator a trustworthy source in that context (QRG, page 26).

For example, a personal travel blog doesn’t have to be written by an expert to be trustworthy. Conversely, a guide on DIY car fixes is more trustworthy when it comes from a car mechanic.

It’s worth noting the difference between experience and expertise. Expertise is about knowledge and skills. Naturally, to gain that, you also need experience. But:

It doesn’t work the other way around. Experience alone doesn’t make you an expert.
Experience doesn’t have to come from expertise.

The original concept of E-A-T was confirmed to concern all topics. With the addition of experience, Google seems to reiterate that by stating, “Experience is valuable for almost any topic” (QRG, page 62).

Experience counts for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics too. But this category of topics that Google pays special attention to isn’t reserved for experts.

In other words, if personal experience is fundamental for establishing trust on the topic, the author doesn’t have to be an expert. Google provides a handy list of examples to better understand this nuance (QRG, page 28):

The difference between experience and expertise for YMYL topics

Here are some ideas on how you can demonstrate firsthand experience in your content. Keep in mind that these are based on an interpretation of Google’s guidelines; you may find other ways too.

Show evidence of personal experience with the subject matter

Let’s take product reviews, for example. Google recently addressed the rash of affiliate websites hosting low-quality product reviews with this document. It basically says that it’s best if the reviews are created by subject matter experts.

However, it’s not enough to prove you’re an expert. You need to show evidence of your firsthand experience with the reviewed product.

Provide evidence such as visuals, audio, or other links of your own experience with the product, to support your expertise and reinforce the authenticity of your review (source).

Here’s an example. Thomas Sanladerer is widely known in the 3D printing industry for his product reviews. But as soon as he stops doing hands-on reviews, he will be a less trustworthy source of product information. And that would be because of the lack of firsthand experience with the product.

Instead, Thomas keeps on getting his hands dirty with each reviewed 3D printer. What better evidence to show your personal experience than pictures like these?

Pictures proving firsthand experience with a product

Explain how you created the content

Even before E-A-T became E-E-A-T, Wirecutter went the extra mile to demonstrate why people can trust its reviews. Similarly, you can lead your content with a note about how it was created. A section like this is the perfect spot for demonstrating firsthand experience.

Wirecutter explaining how it created a review

Demonstrate your experience on a dedicated page

Theoretically, you don’t have to show your experience with the subject each time you write about it. That’s because Google advises quality raters to look at what the author says about themselves.

So consider explaining your personal experience with the subject on an “about” page and even link to your social media profiles if they provide additional evidence. Of course, you can do it together with other methods of demonstrating experience.

References to personal experience on a website — A page about the author of blog posts on helping to cope with cancer (a YMYL topic). The author’s bio shows references to personal experience with the illness.

Your reputation counts

Quality rates are also encouraged to look outside your site for signs of experience (and trust in general).

Look for independent reviews, references, news articles, and other sources of credible information about the website or content creators (QRG, page 27).

For example, website Best Wallet Hacks features an actual table of contents for press mentions. Imagine comparing that with a completely new blog on the same topic no one has heard about—which is more trustworthy?

Table of contents for external website mentions

One of the ways a search engine could infer that information is by following links to a site. After all, Gary Illyes confirmed that links and mentions were substantial for the original E-A-T concept. That probably hasn’t changed with the introduction of experience.

I asked Gary about E-A-T. He said it’s largely based on links and mentions on authoritative sites. i.e. if the Washington post mentions you, that’s good.

He recommended reading the sections in the QRG on E-A-T as it outlines things well.@methode #Pubcon

— Dr. Marie Haynes🐧 (@Marie_Haynes) February 21, 2018

If you lack the experience, invite someone who has it

The fact that the author of the page needs to demonstrate experience doesn’t mean that the owner of the website has to. This means you can still demonstrate experience on topics where you don’t personally have it by inviting guest authors or guest speakers.

The addition of experience to the equation opens up the YMYL topics category for creators with personal experience. On the other hand, it raises the bar on topics where this kind of experience is fundamental.

In any case, this is another of Google’s attempts at serving more helpful, relevant results by filtering out untrustworthy pages. It’s still all about trust:

Finally, there are many aspects of Trust, some which are not captured by Experience, Expertise and Authoritativeness. Please consider other aspects in your overall Trust assessment, such as customer service information for online stores or peer-reviewed publications for academic authors. If a page is untrustworthy for any reason, it has low E-E-A-T (QRG, page 27).

If QRGs are trained to identify other signs of trust, so are the ranking systems. So if you can think of other ways to demonstrate your trustworthiness, go ahead.

This is also a warning for sites that try to game the system: One piece of evidence for experience won’t cover up other signals of untrustworthiness.

Final thoughts

On a final note, with the introduction of E-E-A-T, Google has updated the content quality self-assessment guide. SEOs and content creators can use it as a resource for aligning content with E-E-A-T.

For example, for publishers employing AI for content generation, Google advises disclosing the use of automation to the reader (Google is not against AI content). But before that, you need to ask yourself whether the use of AI to produce content can be seen by the user as reasonable.

Got comments or questions? Ping me on Twitter or Mastodon.

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SEO

State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

Published

16 hours ago

December 2, 2023

Max

State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

Claravine and Advertiser Perceptions surveyed 140 marketers and agencies to better understand the impact of data standards on marketing data, and they’re ready to present their findings.

Want to learn how you can mitigate privacy risks and boost ROI through data standards?

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn how companies are addressing new privacy laws, taking advantage of AI, and organizing their data to better capture the campaign data they need, as well as how you can implement these findings in your campaigns.

In this webinar, you will:

Gain a better understanding of how your marketing data management compares to enterprise advertisers.
Get an overview of the current state of data standards and analytics, and how marketers are managing risk while improving the ROI of their programs.
Walk away with tactics and best practices that you can use to improve your marketing data now.

Chris Comstock, Chief Growth Officer at Claravine, will show you the marketing data trends of top advertisers and the potential pitfalls that come with poor data standards.

Learn the key ways to level up your data strategy to pinpoint campaign success.

View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

SaaS Marketing: Expert Paid Media Tips Backed By $150M In Ad Spend

Join us and learn a unique methodology for growth that has driven massive revenue at a lower cost for hundreds of SaaS brands. We’ll dive into case studies backed by real data from over $150 million in SaaS ad spend per year.

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SEO

GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After ‘Unexpected’ Delays

Published

1 day ago

December 2, 2023

Max

GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After 'Unexpected' Delays

OpenAI shares its plans for the GPT Store, enhancements to GPT Builder tools, privacy improvements, and updates coming to ChatGPT.

OpenAI has scheduled the launch of the GPT Store for early next year, aligning with its ongoing commitment to developing advanced AI technologies.
The GPT Builder tools have received substantial updates, including a more intuitive configuration interface and improved file handling capabilities.
Anticipation builds for upcoming updates to ChatGPT, highlighting OpenAI’s responsiveness to community feedback and dedication to AI innovation.

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SEO

96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here’s How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

Published

2 days ago

December 1, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

It’s no secret that the web is growing by millions, if not billions of pages per day.

Our Content Explorer tool discovers 10 million new pages every 24 hours while being very picky about the pages that qualify for inclusion. The “main” Ahrefs web crawler crawls that number of pages every two minutes.

But how much of this content gets organic traffic from Google?

To find out, we took the entire database from our Content Explorer tool (around 14 billion pages) and studied how many pages get traffic from organic search and why.

How many web pages get organic search traffic?

96.55% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits.

Distribution of pages by traffic from Content Explorer

Before we move on to discussing why the vast majority of pages never get any search traffic from Google (and how to avoid being one of them), it’s important to address two discrepancies with the studied data:

~14 billion pages may seem like a huge number, but it’s not the most accurate representation of the entire web. Even compared to the size of Site Explorer’s index of 340.8 billion pages, our sample size for this study is quite small and somewhat biased towards the “quality side of the web.”
Our search traffic numbers are estimates. Even though our database of ~651 million keywords in Site Explorer (where our estimates come from) is arguably the largest database of its kind, it doesn’t contain every possible thing people search for in Google. There’s a chance that some of these pages get search traffic from super long-tail keywords that are not popular enough to make it into our database.

That said, these two “inaccuracies” don’t change much in the grand scheme of things: the vast majority of published pages never rank in Google and never get any search traffic.

But why is this, and how can you be a part of the minority that gets organic search traffic from Google?

Well, there are hundreds of SEO issues that may prevent your pages from ranking well in Google. But if we focus only on the most common scenarios, assuming the page is indexed, there are only three of them.

Reason 1: The topic has no search demand

If nobody is searching for your topic, you won’t get any search traffic—even if you rank #1.

For example, I recently Googled “pull sitemap into google sheets” and clicked the top-ranking page (which solved my problem in seconds, by the way). But if you plug that URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you’ll see that it gets zero estimated organic search traffic:

The top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demand

This is because hardly anyone else is searching for this, as data from Keywords Explorer confirms:

Keyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demand

This is why it’s so important to do keyword research. You can’t just assume that people are searching for whatever you want to talk about. You need to check the data.

Our Traffic Potential (TP) metric in Keywords Explorer can help with this. It estimates how much organic search traffic the current top-ranking page for a keyword gets from all the queries it ranks for. This is a good indicator of the total search demand for a topic.

You’ll see this metric for every keyword in Keywords Explorer, and you can even filter for keywords that meet your minimum criteria (e.g., 500+ monthly traffic potential):

Filtering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Reason 2: The page has no backlinks

Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, so it probably comes as no surprise that there’s a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and its traffic.

Pages with more referring domains get more traffic

Same goes for the correlation between a page’s traffic and keyword rankings:

Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywords

Does any of this data prove that backlinks help you rank higher in Google?

No, because correlation does not imply causation. However, most SEO professionals will tell you that it’s almost impossible to rank on the first page for competitive keywords without backlinks—an observation that aligns with the data above.

The key word there is “competitive.” Plenty of pages get organic traffic while having no backlinks…

… but from what I can tell, almost all of them are about low-competition topics.

For example, this lyrics page for a Neil Young song gets an estimated 162 monthly visits with no backlinks:

Example of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

But if we check the keywords it ranks for, they almost all have Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores in the single figures:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

It’s the same story for this page selling upholstered headboards:

You might have noticed two other things about these pages:

Neither of them get that much traffic. This is pretty typical. Our index contains ~20 million pages with no referring domains, yet only 2,997 of them get more than 1K search visits per month. That’s roughly 1 in every 6,671 pages with no backlinks.
Both of the sites they’re on have high Domain Rating (DR) scores. This metric shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. Stronger sites like these have more PageRank that they can pass to pages with internal links to help them rank.

Bottom line? If you want your pages to get search traffic, you really only have two options:

Target uncompetitive topics that you can rank for with few or no backlinks.
Target competitive topics and build backlinks to rank.

If you want to find uncompetitive topics, try this:

Enter a topic into Keywords Explorer
Go to the Matching terms report
Set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to max. 20
Set the Lowest DR filter to your site’s DR (this will show you keywords with at least one of the same or lower DR ranking in the top 5)

Filtering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

(Remember to keep an eye on the TP column to make sure they have traffic potential.)

To rank for more competitive topics, you’ll need to earn or build high-quality backlinks to your page. If you’re not sure how to do that, start with the guides below. Keep in mind that it’ll be practically impossible to get links unless your content adds something to the conversation.

Reason 3. The page doesn’t match search intent

Google wants to give users the most relevant results for a query. That’s why the top organic results for “best yoga mat” are blog posts with recommendations, not product pages.

It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"

Basically, Google knows that searchers are in research mode, not buying mode.

It’s also why this page selling yoga mats doesn’t show up, despite it having backlinks from more than six times more websites than any of the top-ranking pages:

Page selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinks

Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"

Luckily, the page ranks for thousands of other more relevant keywords and gets tens of thousands of monthly organic visits. So it’s not such a big deal that it doesn’t rank for “best yoga mats.”

Number of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga mats

However, if you have pages with lots of backlinks but no organic traffic—and they already target a keyword with traffic potential—another quick SEO win is to re-optimize them for search intent.

We did this in 2018 with our free backlink checker.

It was originally nothing but a boring landing page explaining the benefits of our product and offering a 7-day trial:

Original landing page for our free backlink checker

After analyzing search intent, we soon realized the issue:

People weren’t looking for a landing page, but rather a free tool they could use right away.

So, in September 2018, we created a free tool and published it under the same URL. It ranked #1 pretty much overnight, and has remained there ever since.