Algorithmes Google

Google E-A-T: Algorithms and Human Evaluators

E-A-T or EAT is the acronym for "Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness". It is a Google concept composed of a multitude of algorithms designed to refine search results and limit web spam. Here is the complete guide to understanding and optimising for Google EAT and EEAT.

Published on Reading 21 min By Stan De Jesus Oliveira
Définition de Google EAT (EEAT) : des algorithmes et des examinateurs humains

Google EAT for Expertise, Authority and Trust

EAT or E-A-T is the acronym for “Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness” — for expertise, authority and trust.

I prefer to say trust because the patents speak of trust algorithms rather than credibility.

E

The expertise of the author of the web page’s content

A

The authority of the web page and the overall authority of the website (authority of the web source).

T

The trust (or credibility) of the author of the web page’s content

EAT is a Google concept composed of a multitude of algorithms designed to refine search results and limit web spam. It is also important to understand how it is composed in order to improve your natural search engine ranking — and in particular to improve what Google calls your Page Quality (PQ).

Here is a Google infographic that summarises Google EAT (EEAT) very well:

Google E-A-T guidelines

Is EAT a ranking factor?

That is a good question. To begin with, is Google EAT a ranking factor?

The answer is yes, because EAT is a Google concept — an idea that explains a multitude of Google algorithms used to rank web pages.

The fact that it is a concept designed to simplify something is not a bad thing, as long as we open the bonnet and define everything around it. And that is precisely what we are going to do.

The algorithms that make up EAT act differently depending on the topic

YMYL sites — for “Your Money Your Life” — are sites of a medical, legal or financial nature. It is on this type of website that EAT has the greatest impact, even though it applies to any query.

EAT algorithms primarily affect YMYL (Your Money Your Life) topics

The impact of E-A-T in YMYL topics.

As we can see from this infographic, despite the fact that the majority are related to medical topics, in reality whatever the topic of your website, EAT will remain a ranking factor, as almost every domain has people recognised as experts on that subject.

Even if your subject is not an obvious YMYL topic, it is better to pay attention to Google EAT.

Google claims that EAT is not a ranking factor in the strict sense of the term. In the sense that if your website is not sufficiently qualified to discuss your topic (YMYL), then you will not appear in search results. But once you are eligible, EAT does not influence the positions in search results — other factors come into play.

By “eligible”, I mean the fact that the algorithms act when you are at minimum in the top 20.

In reality, I believe that EAT (the algorithms composing it) are made up of ranking factors for many reasons, beyond mere eligibility. Google’s marketing communications should not be taken at face value.

And above all, what are their own EAT definitions — where does Google draw the line?

Note:

Since 2020, Google states: we have sometimes been asked whether E-A-T is a ranking factor. Our automated systems use a mix of many different signals to rank quality content. We have tried to align this mix with what human beings would consider excellent content, as they would evaluate it using the E-A-T criteria. Given this, assessing your own content in terms of E-A-T criteria can help to conceptually align it with the various signals our automated systems use to rank content.

How does Google calculate EAT? Expertise, authority and trust?

Google wants to give you access to the most useful and most relevant information.
To do this, there are a host of algorithms corresponding to the EAT concept — here are the most probable and influential ones:

And other less well-known patents closely linked to semantic SEO, such as:

  • Ranking search results based on entity metrics (https://patents.google.com/patent/US10235423B2/en)
  • Identifying topical entities (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20150278366)
  • …

Google would also have the ability to apply signals to entities registered in the Knowledge Graph in order to carry out EAT assessments. However, EAT cannot be classified as a semantic algorithm, as it is a Google concept composed of both non-semantic and semantic algorithms.

What next?

After calculating their various algorithms, Google calls on humans to verify whether their algorithms are satisfactory for their E-A-T concept.

How supervised training (AI) works with human evaluators (Quality Raters)

Here is how it works:

  • First, they collect the data.
  • They structure it.
  • They develop an algorithm.
  • They train everything (AI — machine learning).
  • They call on humans.
  • Production.

They call on what they term external “evaluators” to regularly measure the quality of search results.

The evaluators analyse the relevance of a website returned by the search relative to the query, as well as the quality of the results based on the level of expertise, reliability and the authoritative nature of the content.

These evaluators must follow guidelines to determine whether or not websites comply with E-A-T.

This document is 172 pages long.

The table of contents of the Google EAT guidelines

It is accessible at the URL:
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/fr//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

The evaluators do not decide on the position of a website.

They report their findings to the engineers, who then make algorithmic adjustments to refine the EAT concept across the web as a whole.

That is how the EAT concept is built.

I could tell you to read it to maximise your chances of ranking. And in fact, Google says so too:

If you understand how raters learn to assess good content, it could help you improve your own content. In turn, you might perhaps do better in search. In particular, raters are trained to understand whether content has what we call strong E-A-T. This stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Reading the guidelines can help you assess how your content performs from an E-A-T perspective and what improvements to consider.

If you would like to see a more aggregated summary of the Quality Raters Guidelines, I invite you to read the one from Search Engine Journal:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-strategies-unlocked-googles-quality-rating-guidelines/156806/#close

EEAT: a new acronym including Experience

In this updated version, the EAT acronym (Expertise, Authority, Trust) evolves to become EEAT, now incorporating Experience — that is, Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness in English.

This concept gains an additional criterion: experience. Content must demonstrate that it was produced with a certain degree of first-hand experience (for example, having used a product, visited a place, or communicated someone’s lived experience). In some cases, the most relevant content for you will come from a person who has concrete experience on the subject.

The writer’s experience and sometimes the user’s

The addition of the notion of “Experience” (the lived experience of the writer, and/or user experience) adds an extra dimension to the analysis carried out by Quality Raters when evaluating the quality of a SERP and its results.

Google defines this notion of Experience in these terms:

“Evaluate to what degree the creator of the content has direct or lived experience on the subject. Many pages are trustworthy and achieve their purpose when created by people with rich personal experience. For example, who would you trust: a product review written by someone who personally used the product, or a ‘review’ from someone who did not? (…) Does the content demonstrate that it was produced with a certain degree of experience, such as actual use of a product, a visit to a place, or the communication of what a person experienced? (…) There are certain situations where what you most value is content produced by someone who has direct experience, lived experience on the subject in question. (…) If you are looking for information on how to correctly file your tax return, that is probably a situation where you want to see content produced by an expert in the field of accounting. But if you are looking for reviews of tax preparation software, you may be looking for a different type of information — perhaps this is a discussion forum of people who have experience with different services.”

Thus, the notion of Experience emphasises the fact that the person who wrote the content being assessed possesses a “background” related to what they write, which in practice comes close to the notion of “Expertise”.

If it is an e-commerce site, for instance, “experience” reviews from product users can also factor into the measurement of a good Quality Page Experience.

Visual representation of EEAT

SEO EAT optimisation

Would you like to optimise your natural search engine ranking through Google’s page quality assessments, and therefore Google EEAT?

Here is a technical infographic of what we can group together as SEO optimisation within the EAT and EEAT concept:

The factors of Google's EAT concept

What are the criteria you should focus on most for EAT?

  • Have an author mention in your articles.
  • Have an author biography.
  • Do not only pursue backlinks — also think about simple mentions (preferably from authority sites).
  • Try to become an entity.
  • Pay attention to search intent.
  • (Create high added-value content — no content duplication — etc.)

All of this connects with semantic SEO and more broadly with Google’s goal of being a Web 3.0 search engine.

Advice on the author space

Having an author description for everything and anything does not improve your ranking on Google.

Some SEO practitioners even prefer to remove the link to the author biography in order to optimise PageRank.

I cannot tell you which is better than the other. I do not know what would be most optimised and in any case “it depends”.

It depends on whether you are cited as an author on other sites, on whether you add a link to the author for an Amazon product article in the hope of appearing more relevant.

Now, if you have a site that covers health or any other YMYL site, having a mention specifying the author with a link redirecting to the biography is undoubtedly far better than optimising PageRank.

I would say that in most cases, the best approach — if we only want to do it for Google’s algorithms — is to always place an author mention without a link. But to display somewhere a link to the author’s biography.

Without forgetting to always include in the structured data the information about the author: their name, their biography.

"author": {"@type": "Person","name": "Stan De Jesus Oliveira","url": "https://createur2site.fr/en/stan-de-jesus-oliveira/"}

Note: structured data such as the author space is closely linked to semantic SEO optimisation.

EAT Guidelines:

If you wish to optimise for EAT, I also invite you to pay attention to Google’s guidelines on EAT:

Content and quality

  • Does the content provide original information, reports, research or analysis?
  • Does the content provide a substantial, comprehensive or complete description of the topic?
  • Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that goes beyond the obvious?
  • If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources and instead provide substantial additional value and originality?
  • Does the page title and/or heading provide a descriptive and useful summary of the content?
  • Does the page title and/or heading avoid being exaggerated or sensational in nature?
  • Is this the kind of page you would want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
  • Would you expect to see this content in or referenced by a printed magazine, encyclopaedia, or book?

Expertise

  • Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as clear sources, evidence of the expertise involved, information about the author or site that publishes it — for example, via links to an author page or the site’s homepage?
  • If you researched the site that produces the content, would you come away with the impression that it is trustworthy or widely recognised as an authority on its subject?
  • Is this content written by an expert or enthusiast who is clearly knowledgeable about the topic?
  • Does the content contain easily verifiable factual errors?
  • Would you feel comfortable trusting this content for issues related to your money or your life?

Presentation and production

  • Does the content present spelling or style issues?
  • Has the content been well produced, or does it seem sloppy or rushed?
  • Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a vast network of sites, such that individual pages or sites do not receive as much attention or care?
  • Does the content contain an excessive number of adverts that distract from or interfere with the main content?
  • Does the content display correctly on mobile devices when viewed?

source: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/08/core-updates

Tedious? Difficult to apply as a recommendation?

When producing content, checking all of these questions will improve your SEO in one way or another.

Semantic SEO optimisation for Google E-A-T

The relationships between entities, people and topics in the Google Knowledge Graph are important to Google, because that is how they can algorithmically evaluate contextual relationships, the quality or strength of the relationship, and therefore authority and expertise.

Example:
An article on “how to cure cancer” is written by a very well-known and award-winning oncologist (cancer specialist). Their name is an entity, connected to many mentions across the web concerning the topic of oncology.

Thus, since the power and quality of the entity linked to the cancer relationship is significant, this article will rank better than one from a non-expert author on this subject.

How Google can evaluate an author through semantics

Here we are not talking about backlinks. We are talking about entities, mentions and relationships. This is why it is important to mention semantic SEO optimisation in order to improve EAT.

There are also other combinations we could mention.

Stanford’s “Guidelines for Web Credibility”

www.webcredibility.org

It would be wrong to say that Google uses the Stanford guidelines to judge the credibility of a website. But it is very close. These guidelines were produced by thousands of experts who structured the information. Make the most of them.

Guideline. Additional comments.
1.
Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.		 You can reinforce the credibility of the website by providing third-party support (citations, references, source material) for the information you present, especially if you link to this evidence. Even if people do not follow these links, you have demonstrated trust in your material.
2. Show that there is a real organisation behind your site. Showing that your website is associated with a legitimate organisation will reinforce the credibility of the site. The simplest way to do this is to provide a physical address. Other features can also help, such as publishing a photo of your offices or listing membership of a chamber of commerce.
3. Highlight the expertise of your organisation and the content and services you provide. Do you have experts on your team? Are your contributors or service providers authorities? Make sure to give their credentials. Are you affiliated with a respected organisation? Be clear. Conversely, do not link to external sites that are not credible. Your site becomes less credible by association.
4. Show that honest and trustworthy people support your site. The first part of this guideline is to show that there are real people behind the site and in the organisation. Then find a way to convey their trustworthiness through images or text. For example, some sites publish employee biographies that mention their family or hobbies.
5. Make it easy to contact you. A simple way to reinforce the credibility of your site is to provide your contact details: phone number, physical address and email address.
6. Design your site so that it looks professional (or appropriate for its purpose). We find that people quickly evaluate a site through visual design alone. When designing your site, pay attention to layout, typography, images, consistency issues, etc. Of course, not all sites gain credibility by looking like IBM.com. The visual design must match the purpose of the site.
7. Make your site easy to use and useful. We are combining two guidelines into one here. Our research shows that sites gain credibility points by being both easy to use and useful. Some site operators forget about users when responding to their own company’s ego or trying to show off what they can do with web technology.
8. Update your site’s content often (or at least show that it has been reviewed recently). People assign more credibility to sites that show they have been recently updated or revised.
9. Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g. adverts, offers). If possible, avoid having adverts on your site. If you must have adverts, clearly distinguish sponsored content from your own. Avoid pop-up adverts, unless you do not mind annoying users and losing credibility. As for writing style, try to be clear, direct and sincere.
10. Avoid errors of all kinds, however minor. Typographical errors and broken links damage a site’s credibility more than most people imagine. It is also important to keep your site operational.

In a global digital marketing strategy, it is indisputable that adhering to this list would help many websites. From an SEO perspective, I think there are really an enormous number of good ideas to exploit here.

Other sources: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.83.7257&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Frequently asked questions about Google E-A-T

Differences between EAT and EEAT

While EAT (E-A-T) focuses on Expertise, Authority and Trust, E-E-A-T adds an additional element to this evaluation: Experience. This new “E” adds the importance of the personal Experience of the author (not user experience). This additional criterion aims to assess whether the content creator has practical or personal experience on the subject discussed, which reinforces the relevance and credibility of their content.

How to optimise for Experience?

Demonstrate your personal expertise: When writing your content, make sure to include examples, anecdotes or references to your personal and practical experience in the relevant field. This will reinforce the credibility of your content and demonstrate that you have in-depth knowledge of the subject.

Use an authentic and transparent tone: Adopt a sincere and transparent tone when talking about your experience. Readers appreciate honesty and are more inclined to trust an author who shares openly.

Encourage testimonials and reviews: Encourage them to share their experiences and reviews, as you would for your e-commerce products.

What is the Google E-A-T score?

The Google E-A-T “score” does not exist as such. It conveys an idea — the idea being that your website, web page (web source) must reflect expertise, authority and trust (are you credible?). This score is called by Google the Quality Page (QP). What about QP vs PR (PageRank)?

How to achieve a good Google EAT score?

If we summarise the criteria of Authority, Expertise and Trust, it gives:

Does the web page have unique content with high added value?

Beyond the content itself, is the content’s author recognised on the web (for example, through author mentions)?

And finally, does your web page or website have backlinks? Even backlinks from seed sites? (see PageRank from 2018).

How to optimise your site for Google EAT?

A page deserves to rank better if it knows what it is talking about and is well known.
That is why complying with EAT is often inseparable from a brand-building strategy.

What are Quality Raters?

Quality Raters are the human evaluators. These evaluators seek to determine, for a given query, whether E-A-T is properly respected by the website displayed in the search results. To judge the quality of a SERP, they use the QRG — Quality Raters Guidelines.
In 2021, the Quality Raters carried out 4,366 launches, including 11,553 live traffic tests and 757,583 tests of search result quality, as well as 72,367 comparative tests.

What is a YMYL site?

A YMYL site — “Your Money Your Life” — is a medical, legal or financial site. A website can be considered a YMYL site if it provides advice to help people make important decisions. Secure your site.

Google EAT: how important is this criterion for SEO?

If your site is a YMYL site, it is crucial to have a good E-A-T. It is likely that most websites are considered YMYL, even if they do not prompt particularly important decisions. In fact, as soon as you carry out credit card transactions, your site must be a trustworthy site. This may be weighted accordingly.

EAT: what is the difference between expertise, authority and credibility?

It is not the same thing, but that will not really help you understand the difference. They are not the same definitions, true — but they all convey the same idea: a “good website”. That said, if you wish to categorise the criteria, it would look something like this:

Expertise:

  • PageRank (obtain backlinks)
  • Google Trust Rank
  • Search intent
  • …

Authority:

  • Google Author Rank: Google Agent Patent and related (is the author recognised and mentioned?)
  • …

Trust / credibility:

  • Knowledge Based Trust
  • Google Knowledge-Enhanced Language Model (KELM) (TEKGEN and REALM)
  • Page experience (HTTPS / secure sites / no intrusive pop-ups, …)
  • Google Panda (high added-value content, no content duplication).
  • Shortest path distance between seed sites in the link graph (TrustRank).
  • …

You can also refer to the infographic on SEO optimisation for Google E-A-T.

EAT in summary:

EAT is a Google concept that groups together the algorithms which calculate a multitude of criteria in order to arrive at the same overall idea:
Refining search results but also acting as an anti-spam filter.

Nobody wants to type “financial advice” into Google and land on SEO copywriters or journalists who may have no expertise whatsoever in the field they are writing about.

EAT is not a standalone algorithm but a concept that explains a multitude of algorithms. These numerous algorithms are then tested by evaluators.

In the very near future, Google will rely more heavily on the E-A-T and E-E-A-T concept, on the credibility, reliability and experience of an entity or website.

For example, they recently declared that:

Soon, when you view a web page on the Google app, you will be able to see a tab containing information about the source with a simple tap, including a brief description, what they say about themselves and what others on the web say about them.

The future of E-A-T.

Source: https://blog.google/products/search/get-the-full-picture-with-helpful-context-on-websites/