All You Need to Know About Expertise, Authority, and Trust
The SEO industry has grown significantly in the past few years, and rightfully so. There has been an enormous change in the implementation of SEO techniques and methods nowadays. Google now recommends to the publishers a set of standard quality guidelines to get the best search results for users. So to rate the websites and content on Google now, you might need a better approach and optimize for E-A-T more consciously.
What exactly is E-A-T?
E-A-T is referred to as Expertise, Authority, and Trust. It is a concept that was created for the third party raters so that they can use a standard method for rating the search results and increase the efficiency of their ratings.
Google’s Search Quality Guidelines suggest that the ratings done by you in no condition should be based on your preferences, personal opinions, beliefs, or political views. It should match the guidelines given by Google. Although, Google’s algorithm differs a lot from the concepts of E-A-T. The concept of E-A-T is created to help third party raters rate the results produced by Google search engine.
Does E-A-T Affect My Ranking Factors?
There is not any proof or research to show that the concepts of E-A-T are the parameters used for ranking the search results by Google. However, they can be expressed and applied to the links.
Links and Authority
Links have been used ever since the start of search engines to measure the authority and expertise in what a user is looking for. When a web page receives a high number of links from all across the internet, especially for a particular topic or blog. Then that web page is considered as an authority page for that topic. However, even in that case, there is no actual authority metric and is just an assumption that, as these many links are leading to that page, it must be authoritative.
How Does a User Judge?
Google is a platform that is entirely dependent on its users. Its only work is to provide authentic and reliable search results when a query is entered by the user. Most of Google’s research papers and patents are based on the need to understand your needs as a user. They suggest that:
- A link is efficient in communicating what page has the expertise to produce intended content.
- Links can help Google comprehend what pages are authoritative, according to you.
- The links give a picture of what websites do you trust.
E-A-T As a Concept
The concept of E-A-T is to train the quality raters on how they can rate a website more efficiently. But you need to understand how this concept will affect the rankings of a search result and how you can make your webpage more reliable for Google.
Expertise:
If your web page provides authentic and useful information to the users, people will naturally link to your page.
Authority:
When your page is authoritative, more people link to it.
Trust:
You can build the trust of a user when the content of your website is consistently qualitative. More users get attracted to a website if they find the information on the page useful and worth some price. When a large number of people see the benefit of getting the information or service from your site, they regard it as a trustworthy source. Also, such sites usually gain more popularity in short periods in the social media world.
Can You Optimize for the Expertise Parameter of a Website?
The short answer is No. Your website is considered as an expert resource when people benefit from the site and become a consistent part of the website. No optimization can be done to increase the expertness of a website as it is not really a metric but an opinion. When a person finds the content or service on your website valuable, they surely return to the website.
They also refer the website to their friends and family as they can see the benefit of using it. When this happens, your website encounters more regular traffic, and the website becomes an expert resource.
Optimizing the Authority of a Website
You can judge the authoritativeness of your website by the number of links that are pointed to the website. More links to a site denote that the content on the website is worthful and therefore, the website qualifies to be an authority website. So you know, Google does not have any metric that is termed as “authority.” People usually consider the page rank as an authority metric. When you say you want to optimize the website for authority, it generally doesn’t make much sense. Page rank can not be optimized directly. If you provide better and useful content to your audience, the page rank will gradually show its growth.
Optimizing Your Website’s Trustworthiness
You can not check the trust factor of your website on Google, as there isn’t actually a parameter that scores the trust factor of a website. There are several research papers to indicate that Google has no direct link to check the truthfulness of any website. There are certain Link Distance Ranking Algorithms that Google might use to consider the trustworthiness of a website. So to build a trust factor, all you can do is keep authentic information on your website. So that more people can relate to its genuineness and link to your website. This is the only way through which Google will notice and improve the ranking of your website.
Optimizing for the Concept?
All the given concepts are just perceptions and descriptions of the content of your website. If your approach to creating the content of your website focuses on excellence and authenticity, you can build more expertise, authority, and trust. But there isn’t an actual metric of these concepts that can be optimized by you.
Google Rankings and Author Bios
Until now, we have been focusing on how Google relates or does not relate to E-A-T concepts. Similarly, there are author biographies that people generally term as a medium to rank your website. Google has never filed a patent about it, and this general idea came from the misconception of Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines. As the SEO industry was deeply analyzing the ways to improve rankings of the websites, they made up the idea that author bios and E-A-T concepts can boost up a website’s ranking.
The Role of Quality Raters Guidelines
Quality Raters Guidelines have no link to the usage of Google algorithm and how it works. It is made for the purpose to standardize ratings for third-party raters. So that they can produce quality results in the way they rate Google search results. Google does not want the rater to rate a website based on their personal opinions or prejudices, so they came with these concepts so that every rater can relate to a common set of goals, and the quality can be maintained.
QRG can be used to create strategies through which your website can improve its importance and raise the level of content. But it will be silly to make a judgment about the ranking of your website based on these concepts.
What Google Algorithms Wants?
The sole purpose of Google algorithms is to enhance their understanding of the user’s search queries and the results in the form of web pages. The updates in the algorithm of Google is always about BERT, Natural Language Processing Research, and RankBrain and never about the E-A-T concepts. Google just wants to comprehend the search query of a user and produce more effective results.
Do Not Rely on E-A-T for your Websites Ranking
Pubcon Gary Illyes, an analyst in Google, confirmed in October 2019 that E-A-T has nothing to do with the rankings or the algorithms of Google. It was cleared that E-A-T is a concept only designed for the quality control process of raters. It is a misconception, raised by certain people that QRG can have any effect on Google’s algorithm or webpage rankings.
Quality Raters Guidelines have No Hidden Codes
It is very clear from all that we have studied till now that QRG is not any metrics that will affect your website’s ranking. They are just built for the publishers and quality control raters to judge the quality of the websites. So do not make the mistake of improvising or optimizing your website’s content based on the given guidelines. As they won’t have any impact on the ranking of your website.
If you are really willing to improve the organic rankings and listings of your website, then put more focus on the concepts like Nofollow Hints, RankBrain, and BERT. Only when you will comprehend the actual need of a user, you will optimize the content of your website according to those needs.
So stop wasting your time on unauthentic and altered information like E-A-T concepts, which has no relation with your website’s ranking. And start looking at the ways to design the content of your website in such a way that it becomes useful for the people. Once people start finding value in your website’s content or services, the website itself will witness more traffic and better ranks at the Google search results.