Google Adds Extra ‘E’ to the EAT Guidelines | News
There are over 200 factors that go into Google’s algorithm, and these have grown and developed over the years. This means that SEOs need to keep alert to new developments and changes to the way Google ranks web pages which may impact their clients and companies.
EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. These are search quality rater guidelines that help explain what content needs to have to rank well in Google’s results pages.
This week, Google announced that an extra E was being added around ‘Experience’; further expanding on the current framework outlined in their new search quality guidelines briefing.
Google have this to say on the reason for the introduction of the new standard:
“There are some situations where really what you value most is content produced by someone who has first-hand, life experience on the topic at hand.”
The context of the search can also have an impact on the type of content you may want to see, and the levels of ‘experience’ that content is informed by:
“If you’re looking for information on how to correctly fill out your tax returns, that’s probably a situation where you want to see content produced by an expert in the field of accounting. But if you’re looking for reviews of a tax preparation software, you might be looking for a different kind of information—maybe it’s a forum discussion from people who have experience with different services.”
Thoughts from Varn
Comment from Varn’s Head of Technical SEO Aimee:
“The clarity offered by this announcement is interesting. It all links back into what Google is trying to do in all of their search engine based activities, serving the right content to the right people and making sure that content is reliable and useful enough to provide the searcher with what they are looking for.
If you have content around product and service reviews, showing clearly where and why the content creator has relevant experience to produce the content is critical, and should be being done already as part of the wider EEAT framework.“
If you have any questions on the above or want to learn more about how you can increase the chances of your content ranking, feel free to have a chat with the Varn team today.
