E-E-A-T is the standard Google’s search quality raters use to judge whether a page deserves trust. Their handbook, the search quality rater guidelines, defines the four parts like this:
- Experience: whether the creator has first-hand or life experience of the topic, such as having used the product.
- Expertise: whether the creator has the knowledge or skill the topic needs.
- Authoritativeness: whether the creator or the site is known as a go-to source for it.
- Trust: whether the page is accurate, honest, safe and reliable. The handbook puts trust at the center: an untrustworthy page has low E-E-A-T however experienced or expert it looks.
Google added the first E, for experience, in December 2022.
Google says it isn’t a ranking factor. The raters’ grades still shape ranking.
Google says E-E-A-T itself isn’t a specific ranking factor, and that its raters don’t directly influence ranking. What their grades do is measure. Google uses them to check that its ranking changes work, and in the US antitrust case the court found that RankEmbed, one of Google’s ranking models, was trained on search logs together with human raters’ scores.
So there is no E-E-A-T number to raise. There is a site whose trustworthiness Google’s systems were built to recognize, and that is what the work changes.
Where raters look
The handbook sends raters to three places to judge a site:
- what the site says about itself, starting with its About page;
- what others say about it: independent reviews, references, news articles;
- what the page itself shows, including its reviews and comments.
It also says what trust takes in a shop: “Online stores need secure online payment systems and reliable customer service.” And it tells raters to discount reviews with a conflict of interest, such as a manufacturer praising its own product.
What E-E-A-T asks of a store or a service site
- An About page that says who runs the business, where it is and how to reach it.
- Prices, delivery, returns and contact details a customer can find before paying, and a checkout that’s secure.
- Reviews on the platforms your customers read, where you can’t write them yourself.
- Product and service pages written from experience: what the product is like to use, who it suits and who it doesn’t, photos you took.
- Credentials where your trade has them, stated where a customer can check them: a licence number, a registration, a membership.
- On health, money or safety, the higher bar the handbook sets for those topics: advice from someone qualified to give it, with sources a reader can check.
What doesn’t work
Anything that adds a claim without the evidence behind it: an author box listing credentials nobody can check, a badge that says “trusted”, reviews the business wrote itself, structured data describing what the page doesn’t show. The structured data rules in Google’s guidelines for SEO forbid marking up content readers can’t see, and a rater or a customer who looks finds the gap.
Most of it is work on your own pages
The pages that sell come first: rewritten from what you know about what you sell, in the words your customers search with, with the proof a buyer looks for before paying. That’s the work of Rerank’s organic SEO services. Authoritativeness also grows with focus, a site that answers its subject one question at a time, which is what topical authority means.