Dec 17

Dec 17 Are You Experienced? Google's new E-E-A-T Rating Standards

But first, are you experienced? Jimi Hendrix

Google has added a new component for rating. In addition to the long-heled E-A-T—expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness—for quality rater guidelines, Google has added experience.

That means you have to know what you are talking about.

Chapter 8.3 of Google’s quality rater guidelines has information regarding the criteria for achieving the highest level of E-E-A-T:

“Very high E-E-A-T is a distinguishing factor for Highest quality pages. A website or content creator who is the uniquely authoritative, go-to source for a topic has very high E-E-A-T. A content creator with a wealth of experience may be considered to have very high E-E-A-T for topics where experience is the primary factor in trust. A very high level of expertise can justify a very high E-E-A-T assessment. Very high E-E-A-T websites and content creators are the most trusted sources on the internet for a particular topic.”

Your Own Voice of Your Experience

Now it’s more important than ever to differentiate your business with your own experience of how you conduct business, offer your services, or create useful products.

Share case studies and examples of how you work.

The Problem with chatGPT

Ai writers can produce natural language about your topic. But the information is culled from other websites.

You need to add your unique perspective on the topic. It’s called information gain. It’s differentiates your page form all the other pages out their on the same topic.

The best way to make your page unique is to add your own personal experience on the topic.

The YOUness of You

Since I started writing on the web almost 10 years ago and writing about writing for the web, I’ve stressed the importance of your business being unique. The YOU of your business. It’s how people come to understand who you are and what you do.

Now it’s more important than ever to bring your unique experience to the web and share it with others. Google will understand how you are different.

When you do keyword research to learn what people are searching for in your industry, be sure to add your business experience to the actual content you write.

You want to teach Google about your business so the search engines knows who you are and what your experience is in the industry.

Stay With Topics That Relate to Your Industry

Sometimes people use keywords with high search volume because they believe it will bring more traffic to their page, hoping once a viewer arrives as the page they will discover the true value of the business. But if the topic doesn’t relate to you, you’ll have a low quality rating.

Chapter 5.1 of Google’s search quality rater guidelines has examples of what quality raters are instructed to look for when evaluating a low level of E-E-A-T:

Low quality pages often lack an appropriate level of E-E-A-T for the topic or purpose of the page. Here are some examples:

The content creator lacks adequate experience, e.g. a restaurant review written by someone who has never eaten at the restaurant
The content creator lacks adequate expertise, e.g. an article about how to skydive written by someone with noexpertise in the subject
The website or content creator is not an authoritative or trustworthy source for the topic of the page, e.g. tax form downloads provided on a cooking website.
The page or website is not trustworthy for its purpose, e.g. a shopping page with minimal customer service information

For an in-depth look at the new guidelines and a more technical evaluation read Lily Ray’s article about the Quality Rater Guidelines.