It is very difficult to clearly rationalize the idea of what level an issue plays a role among the ranking factors of websites, it can even be called an unknown, but we make evaluations based on the factors that we agree that it works or even should work. In this way, SEO expertise actually points us to reverse engineering, which somehow seems like a paradox.
For you here, SearchLiaison has recently shared some tweets about EEAT working principles. I wanted to take a brief look at these for you.
What is EEAT from a Google Employee’s perspective?
In a youtube video of Marie Haynes at an event, google staff comment on EEAT;
“EEAT is something that we developed 10-12 years ago, and it’s a bracket to indicate whether people’s consumption, or the way they get information, is helpful or harmful. This is actually a detail in our daily life.
It’s the basic template for how we evaluate a website based on Expertise, Competence and Reliability, and we take that into every single query and every single result. ”
So if this is part of every search query, where should we go when we talk about Google ranking factors? If it’s part of every query, can’t it be a ranking factor? Or how can it be?
Let’s continue to look at the history of Google Ranking Factors.
Is EEAT a google ranking factor?
In 2012, Matt Cutts, who worked as a senior engineer at Google, says that with EEAT, a quality criterion has come to google rankings, that is, it shows that a content is considered to be worth ranking. At this point, we are based on an interview he gave in those years. The case discussed in the interview is that there is a discussion about whether the website belonging to a hypothetical person named “Jane” deserves to be ranked by producing variations of the content in the rankings or whether the copies it creates deserve to be ranked.
Matt Cutts’ take on this is that “while they’re not copies, they don’t bring anything new to the table.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it, as if it could very well explain the results that our sites have been affected by since last year’s much buzzed about Helpful Content update. Moving on, Matt Cuts says, “Google will try to determine if there is a real difference between these results and will only show one of them. These types of sites need to ask themselves what their added value is and figure out what makes them special.”
For example, if you want to read a content about cinema, or if there is a content production, would you like to read this content from a movie critic or would you like to read a movie article from poor Koralp Selçuk? Of course, the content prepared by a movie critic will be more satisfying. I am not suggesting here that the background, experience or expertise of the website author is a ranking factor, but I would like to underline a difference that can bring a website to the level that google wants to rank.
If you examine the Google Algorithm updates, I believe that you can see that all the arrangements made for the user to reach the right search are based on such awareness. Even John Mueller underlines that it is important for a web page to be differentiated and interesting in order to be noticed and ranked by google.
How does the effect on the E-E-A-T Algorithm work?
In fact, it will be very productive to find the right answers to the question of what an SEO expert does. When SEO experts discuss ranking factors, if you are unfamiliar with the subject, you may feel like you are involved in many technical details, which is very normal. Search Engines have the capacity to create very in-depth agenda topics and have a deep pool of knowledge. In fact, all the details are about user attention, which is the basic principles of marketing, and the basic summary of this is the steps to conceptualize the processes related to EEAT. In other words, we are discussing what needs to be done to demonstrate the competence, experience and expertise of our website on the subject.
The best way to explain this is to think about “relevance”, which is also the most important part for Google Algorithms.
What is Relevance for SEO efforts?
It used to be said that relevance was directly related to the keyword, even that websites with keywords in the domain name were more advantageous, although I do not agree with it now, it is still a controversial issue, maybe I will write for it. Now google algorithms have a natural language understanding, this term, abbreviated as NLU, tends to identify searches that are relevant or related to the subject title. There are also currents that develop SEO strategies by approaching this in some ways with the “Topical Authority” Title authority approach, which I strongly agree with their discussions.
For example, imagine that the topic you are researching on google is “how can I lose weight?”, A SEO expert with low competence will tell you that he thinks our keyword is “lose weight”, saying that the web page should have words that match the search query. These are very simple examples, these mistakes cannot be made, and I keep the examples as simple as possible because my intention is to convey experience rather than to create controversy. Well, let’s create a 600-word article on the question “How can I lose weight?”. Imagine that someone asks you how can I lose weight, what would you answer?
You can advise them to eat less, you can advise them to lose weight by going directly through this keyword set, natural language understanding is actually a similar query. Now you have a response for the keyword “diet”, not in the sense that you will rank, because there is a lot of content on this subject and you are standing a little on the edge. But the search intention of someone who wants to lose weight and the search intention of the title Diet are common at many points.
So it’s worth creating a checklist and reviewing your content to see if it matches EEAT.
To better understand the EEAT;
In order to understand whether the content added to a website or displayed on a page is worth ranking well in SERP results for google, or to make sure that the reason for a falling ranking is not due to your content quality, it may not be bad for you to answer certain questions.
SEO experts are experienced in this field, it is very useful to review the questions of how a content should be handled when publishing a content, through which attention points the content reaches the content better and which search queries we want to answer.