Google’s E-A-T: Busting 10 of the Biggest Misconceptions by Lily Ray #503

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, one of the owners of EWR Digital. And my name is Matt Bertram. I'm your SEO strategist. The SEO strategist and also one of the owners of EWR Digital. And even the founder, like that can go into the description appropriately. You got to correct that a few times. I'm looking at the date of our last podcast, and it was 11-9. 2020. Today's 12-15-2020. Matt, what happened? That's a long time. Yeah, well, I got COVID, and then your wife's mom died. And then we had to hit Amazon bestseller list. So there's some things that needed to happen. Oh, wait, that's right. That's like right behind me, right? That's the Amazon bestseller right there, Rise of the Personal Brand. Does it look like I'm looking at it? What number is that? It's a little grainy. It looks like it's number one. Oh, okay. And then that's number two, Conversion Funnels. Number one, Rise of the Personal Brand. If you're just listening, I'm actually, I've got the Amazon bestseller list printed up behind me on the green screen. And I'm pointing at our book that is an Amazon number one seller. I think we made three categories, didn't we? Yeah, we actually made five. Five categories. Yeah, but I mean, no one's killed. Sales and presentations, online marketing, small business marketing, business etiquette. And then there's one other category, I can't remember. But yeah, we did pretty dang good. Good. High five. We had Chris and I and seven other co-authors put together a book, kind of an extension of Build Your Brand Mania, how different people built their personal brands. All people were pretty heavy hitters in the influencer space and, you know, got that out there, did a book launch and hit a home run, knocked it out of the park. Any one of us could have hit, I think, Amazon bestseller. I think, you know, when you have nine different people together, it's quite a good hourhouse. Yeah, absolutely.

So, like Amazon bestseller, COVID, Forbes article? Was there a Forbes article in there? Yeah, I did just get my first article in Forbes, yeah. Boom. That is awesome. Search engine journal quote. Actually, we'll be referencing that in our review. I mean, our testimonial, pretty awesome. Okay, so we've been busy. We apologize. We're back. Our last one was Gary, right? Our last podcast. Yeah, I mean, that one should care. You should have had to listen to that one a few times. There are so many nuggets in there. And so that's what we're going to extend upon today. We're going to talk more about EAT. We really believe as kind of a new direction with the Google algorithm, EAT is becoming more and more important. And it's something that we're focusing on internally with our clients. Also, just one quick note. You know, I've talked to a few clients as we're kind of end of the year planning, planning into next year. Want to let everybody know our agency is quite healthy. You know, PPP took great care of us. All right. So we're quite healthy. And we've been doing some really positive things as an organization. So we're a healthy company. We're focused on the SMB market. So, you know, that's our focus going into next year. We do work with some bigger brands, but they're knocking on our door asking us to help them with SEO strategy. But our primary focus is the small and medium-sized business. So don't worry about that. We're not going anywhere as an agency. We do have a couple of fun side projects that Chris and I have started because the team's growing and we, you know, have some really talented people. So we're doing some other things. But our primary focus is SMB. We are a healthy company. We're not going anywhere. This podcast has been going on for 10 years. Agency's been around 20 years. Don't worry. We're here to stay. We're a rock. We're not satisfied with 3.5 million downloads. Like that's just not a satisfying number.

The goal is 10, right? That's the goal. I'm talking about COVID. I don't have COVID. We are broadcasting live from Houston, Texas. Actually, two different locations in Houston, Texas. And Matt and I, we are your Results Rebels. Here is the testimony. I got to just jump into this. This is from Chris Krematos. How do you say it? Krematos. Yeah. Krematos. Yeah. Krematos. There. That makes sense. He is the founder of PodFest. By the way, you were once a speaker at PodFest, right? Is that? Did you drive to that? Yeah. No. Yeah. Chris is a good guy. I like him and his wife and the organization. We've done a few things to help him out with side projects. And I love the community there. I think it's phenomenal. And yeah. So Chris is awesome. Excellent. His quote is, great and complete show on SEO. Something most people are overlooking these days is SEO. And we're going to jump in. The article is Google's Eat. That's E-A-T. Busting 10 of the biggest misconceptions about Google Eat. And this is from Lily Ray Lilly, SEO director at Path Interactive. Patif, to you. We could be at SEO Mythbusters. Oh, that'd be cool. That's where we are today. We're the SEO Mythbusters today. We can't say it, but we are it. But we are it. All right. Eat, by the way, if you're wondering, it stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. I'm excited that I was able to say all of those words correctly. Yes. So Eat, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Within the past year, really, Eat is a major topic of discussion within the SEO industry. As I was preparing for this podcast, I was actually listening, reading quotes from Gary Ilsh, who is quoted in here. He's with Google, watching a couple of videos of people speaking about Eat on some SEO stages, and it was pretty good. So here are 10, bursting 10 of the biggest misconceptions about Eat. Number one, just so you know, Eat is not an algorithm, right? In fact, let's start it

off. Gary Ilsh, he says, Google has a collection of millions of tiny algorithms that work in unison to spit out a ranking score. For many of those baby algorithms, look for signals in pages or content that can be conceptualized as Eat. That's what they're looking for. I don't know if you've got any comment on Eat. Yeah, no. Eat, everybody wants to Eat score, Eat algorithm. It's not replacing everything that Google has been doing. It's really just a humanized, watered-down version so us humans can understand how quickly the computer analyzes things. And it's really meant for the quality rater people, the quality raters. I think there's like 20,000 or something quality raters. You can even become a quality rater. I think it pays 15 bucks an hour and you've got to work, I think, 15, 20 hours a week. I was actually, you know, thinking about going through and at least just taking the test, right? Like, because I think that this is so, so important. And the guidelines, I think, are like 160 something pages long. So it's a healthy read. But yeah, I mean, Eat, I think his, like, authorship came out a few years ago and they rolled it back and now this is like authorship on steroids. That would be my summary. Authorship on steroids. All right. So number two myth, there is no Eat score. It really was in the same Q&A with Gary Ilsh where he says no internal Eat score or YMYL score. Quick question, YMYL, Matt? Your life, your money. Your money or your life or anything. I'm dyslexic. I'm dyslexic, but. All right. Number three, Eat is not a direct ranking factor. So expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness are also not individual ranking factors. So there's no Eat score. There's no E score, A score, or T score. These are really conceptual things. Not if, and really, this is Danny Sullivan asked this and answered this in a tweet. Is Eat a ranking factor? Not if you mean there's some technical thing like with speed that we can

measure directly because there is no ranking factor. But it is signals that people are looking for as they're reviewing the results, the Google results. Now, I think probably that someone could take, you know, like, I mean, we don't know the secret Coca-Cola or Google formula, right? But I think that there are some best practices that I'm kind of putting together on like, you know, EWR, like Eat ranking score kind of thing of like, basically, here's some best practices that look like it's very important to the guidelines. And we're going to kind of, you know, 15 point list, try to check these off for our clients. And so it's like an informal Eat score to kind of even bring it down further. But I think, you know, when Gary was on our podcast, he was really against that. But I'm sure somebody is going to create it like Ahrefs or Moz. There's going to come up with certain factors. I think, though, those factors are really quite hard to measure, right? So you can't point to something directly. So it's like, it's a combination of a series of things that they're looking at that each thing comprises of a component of the E, of the A, and of the T. So I think it's something that could be measured. But I don't know how, you know, algorithmically someone could grab certain things and calculate it if you didn't actually know what Google was doing. But I think you could put together probably some best practices, right? Estimates, yeah. That would be kind of similar to domain authority, right? Like, that's just an estimate based on an algorithm that somebody's done estimating the Google algorithm. Yeah, I think Ahrefs domain authority has some issues in it. But I think, again, it's an estimation, right? It's a good guideline. Yeah. Yeah. All right, number four, EAT is not something that every, this is bursting the myth, right? Busting the myth. EAT is not something that every site owner needs to heavily focus on. Google is explicit in its

quality guidelines that the level of EAT expected of a given website depends on the topics, right? For example, high EAT medical advice should be written or produced by people or organizations with appropriate medical expertise and accreditation. Whereas if you've got just a website, like a hobby website, you know, what are the expertise, trustworthiness that you need for those, authoritativeness that you need for those? Well, so that's what I would say, like, right, like, that's what they're trying to stay away from is people giving medical advice that are not medical practitioners, because they got to review the quality of what's going on or financial planning, or, you know, they're looking for people with certifications within that, your money, your life, and they're kind of expanding outside of that. But, like, if you owned a, if you had a camping website, right, like, they want to see that you have, like, authority, and if you're talking about affiliate links to different camping supplies on Amazon, they want to see that you, like, actually been camping, like, that you're a camper, right? Like, that's a level of authoritativeness to talk about, hey, I bought this camping equipment, here's a picture of me buying it, here's a video of me setting it up, here's a video of me talking about it, here's the receipt that I bought it, whatever, like, to justify, hey, I have experience in this product, right? Or, like, it's just like leaving a review, like, they want to have some kind of quality guideline, like on Amazon, right? Like, you and I can't leave a review for our own book, right? There's some kind of guideline. And then also, some of the book, like, if you leave a review, there's a verified review, like, of someone that bought the book, and, like, an unverified review, right? So there's different levels of trust associated with this, like, someone's reviewing it, but if they haven't read the book or haven't bought the book, how do they know it's good, right? And so, you know, I think it's

a sliding scale, but they're looking at, do you have some kind of, you know, experience talking about whatever this topic is? And also, are you the appropriate person to be giving that experience, right? Because if you're saying something that, you know, like, if you would say, hey, take this home remedy, and, you know, you'll cure yourself of cancer, like, what kind of repercussions would that have, right? Like, so Google wants to try to vet out to a certain degree to make sure if they're providing that at the top of the search results, it's accurate information. Yep. Yeah, and it goes on to say, for companies who discuss YMYL, again, your money, your life topics, which can have a direct impact on readers' happiness, health, financial success, or well-being, EAD is of the utmost importance. It's also important to note that inherently e-commerce websites, because they get your credit card, are YMYL sites. So, all right, number five, the myth that we are busting. Focusing on EAT is not a replacement for technical SEO auditing or any other SEO objective. Addressing EAT does not improve SEO performance in a vacuum, right? So there's a clear understanding that it's important, but for sites that have been negatively impacted by algorithm updates, EAT is just one area to consider. And we can talk, I mean, we could talk probably 10 podcasts about like technical SEO and the things that we see wrong on a daily basis, not even just a weekly basis, on a daily basis with websites that come to us whose technical SEO is just off. And if you've got this great authority, this great trustworthiness, then what value is that if your website's actually not showing up well? Like if it doesn't show up well because of your technical SEO? Well, yeah. So I would say that EAT is something to add into the mix on top of what you're already doing. For people that were, they felt that were negatively affected by this update that happened kind of, you know, August, September, like kind

of range of this year. And then there was a few like the medic update and some other updates. I think they're all kind of really tied into EAT to a certain degree. But really people that are affected by it, it's probably not that they were affected by it if you're not doing anything wrong, okay? It was probably that other people were hitting on some of these factors, ranking factors from EAT, and they were impacted more positively than maybe you were, right? So if you only dropped a couple ranking points, there was probably somebody else was more lifted up by it. You weren't like penalized from it, if that makes sense. No, that makes perfect sense. So prioritize EAT among other SEO efforts in accordance with how severe the other issues are and how much they may be impacting your SEO results. Number six, EAT is not new. Neither is Google's fight against misinformation. With all the content about EAT, some professionals have claimed that EAT is a recent initiative of Google. That started around the time of August 1, 2018, the core algorithm update that happened then. However, EAT was first introduced in 2014 version of the Google Quality Guidelines. So this is something that they've been talking about for a long time. And if you look at the phrase that we say regularly, provide a good experience to the Google user and Google will look favorably upon you and you put that like, well, good experience needs to come with from a trustworthy source, right? There's a reason that there's a reason that we lean on particular information more than other information. And that's the trustworthiness of that particular source. One of the things that I've really seen here happen recently, and I would even encourage Google to consider parsing out these, I don't know, Web 2.0 sites, right? Like they're dominating the top of the rankings now, right? Like Yelp and in any industry, like HomeAdvisor, because they're pulling together and they have a lot of authoritativeness of what's going on. And so

a lot of these sites that are then reselling, I guess, the SEO traffic and generating the road traffic are dominating the search results. There's a couple kind of Web 2.0 websites, I think like expertise.com or whatever is one of them, but they built this site. Like I had a conversation with, I don't know that some of the owners, but they built this site like six years ago, right? And it just was just hanging out, right? It wasn't really doing anything. It wasn't ranking. And then in this algorithm change, there are certain factors that it had. And now it's shot up to the top and it's one of the top referral sites now. And they actually can't even handle like the traffic volume right now. And they're like playing catch up because they built it. They kind of set the project to the side and it's really taken off because Google's in there kind of tweaking some different things and it had a lot of stuff that hit eat and it just launched the site, you know, and so it's, it's kind of interesting what's happening. Hopefully they were on AWS so that they could scale it quickly. There's so many problems. I don't even understand what you just said. Like I hate AWS. Oh, well, well, yeah, but it is very scalable. You can scale it up very quickly. So that's, it's, uh, and it comes with a lot of challenges. That's, that's for sure. Yeah, I know. I feel like AWS has a lot of problems, honestly, but. All right. Number seven, the August 1, 2018 update, the one that we just mentioned was not officially named medic or the eat update. So this is just kind of interesting and it's a myth. Um, it was informally named medic by Barry Schwartz, right? He's a, uh, a frequent, uh, contributor, contributing author, um, uh, the core algorithm update. Well, actually core algorithm updates. They're all core updates. They're all core updates. They happen real time and they're called Fred. Like, I think that's what

when we, when we interviewed him, he confirmed that. All right. Number eight, adding author biographies is not in and of itself a ranking factor. So Google is not able to recognize or retrieve information about every author. Okay. So here we go. One of the most, let's break that down. One of the most common recommendations to improve eat is to ensure all content contains a byline for the author who wrote it. And ideally each author has a biography or a dedicated page explaining who they are and why they can be trusted to provide high quality content. Uh, I'm going to continue reading this in the Google quality guidelines. They repeatedly recommend that quality raters should look at individual author biographies as a way to determine the extent to which the authors are experts on the topic. So it's not just the fact that you have the author tag. It's like, what does your author tag say? It's like, great. It was Matt. And now he's talking about, I don't know, doing brain surgery and he's a really amazing SEO guy. Like, like the quality rater needs to take that into account. Well, yeah. I mean, they're looking for mentions outside the website, but also they're looking at the about us page and they're looking at like the authorship as it filled out. Um, that wasn't so much issue before. Um, you know, again, we're developing some, I guess, uh, unofficial guidelines or EWR guidelines. Like one example of one of the things that I'm considering is, um, developing a gravitar for each person that writes on your blog, right? A WordPress gravitar, linking it to that. Also, if you're a high profile person, you probably need maybe a Wikipedia page. Like there's, there's certain sources that Google looks at that are very authoritative. And if they can go to that information and reference you as an author, then it's going to build that, that credibility. But even Google has said, they're looking at, uh, mentions of you and your company, uh, and the topics you're talking

about off, off your site. Right. So you want to, cause, cause it's not just what you say, right? I'm a SEO expert. It's, are other people saying that like Forbes, you know, for example. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you mean in reference to the article that you recently had on Forbes? Yes. Yes. Very good. All right. So, um, and, and actually there's another quote here from Gary, which says, uh, in web search, we have entities for very popular authors. Like if you were an executive for the Washington post, then you probably have an entity. It's not about the author. It's about the entity. Like what is the entity behind the person that supports their credibility? All right. Number nine, YMYL sites. Again, your money, your life sites are not the only websites being affected by core algorithm updates. And eat is not the only issue causing performance declines after algorithm exit, uh, updates. Well, recent core updates have overwhelmingly affected YMYL sites, particularly sites in the health and medical space. There are other categories that felt impact and really the example he gave was recipes. So I don't, do you, have you ever worked on a recipe website, Matt? I have not worked on a recipe blog. I just know that they get a ton of traffic. They do. Yeah. And, uh, you know, but I, you know, I could see that. I mean, you probably don't want to mix like arsenic, like, again, that's nice. Who's amazing. Down to that SEO. Um, are there any recipes that you look up? Um, no. I actually have a recipe book from college that like, I don't know, my mom helped put together and, uh, they put together all like the top recipes and I learned how to cook all that stuff. And I don't know. That's what I use. Like, I mean, I'm sure you can have an iPad and pull up recipes really easily, but I've found like, sometimes I try things that are new and they don't taste good. So, so you just go back to

the old standards. I stay close to the best on like, you know, food. Sometimes I once cooked a meal, uh, actually, you know, for, for, uh, a mutual friend of ours, Patrick, and he finished it and he was like, well, thank you, Chris. That was filling. So, uh, it was filling. All right. Number 10, eat is not something you can plaster on your site and expect immediate, immediate results. Addressing eat takes time. So we all know there's certain SEO tactics. For instance, you speed up your website. Like that's one, uh, such as optimizing metadata or fixing technical issues. You can see immediate performance increase. East eat doesn't work that way. It's because it's not a direct ranking factor. So you've got to wait for not just like your site to be indexed or for other sites to be indexed that are related to it to help support your, um, your eat, uh, ranking. And, uh, so, yeah, I think it's a multiplier, right? Like, I think that there are certain things that you still need to do for SEO and that box, uh, of like above, below the line on, on authoritativeness, uh, you know, trust expertise has to be kind of over a certain threshold to kind of click it on. Right. And then it gives you kind of a multiplier. And then like, if you don't have that clicked on, if you're still doing, um, you know, some of the stuff that, you know, works for SEO, it doesn't have as great of an impact. That's kind of what I've, I've really seen that since August. And that's why I've been working to kind of retool, uh, some of the strategies because now there are certain things that you have to focus on that, uh, you didn't have to focus on previously. And I think it's a good move in the right direction to try to, you know, vet out spam, right? Like to find, you know, Hey, and, and, and we've seen this like online, like you have a social profile or

you have a social persona and, you know, you have to be genuine in that. And, you know, you can't have multiple profiles. Like, I think I remember when Facebook came out, people had like, here's my work profile. Here's my personal profile. Maybe you act differently. One's, you know, one's public, one's, you know, private, what everything's merging all the different, you know, platforms. Like you, you maybe have a conversation in a different way, but you're one person and that's what, that's what, that's what Google's trying to identify is, okay, who are you? Right. And then like, what kind of thornate authoritativeness do you have on what topics? And let me, let me consider that when I'm serving up, uh, ranking factors or kind of blogs or videos or whatever to say, Hey, this person, uh, deserves to be higher up. Right. And so, uh, like a doctor should be higher up than, you know, um, somebody, you know, that, uh, I mean, I would say most of the time, I think a doctor should be higher up than maybe some homeopathic person, but I think that there's some legitimacy to homeopathic stuff, but you know, what we're seeing with, I guess the political climate too, you know, the social media sites and, and the big tech companies are just going to decide what, what information we deserve to see. Um, and you know, the better, you know, how about how to kind of play by their rules, uh, I think the better, right. And so you can go read these, uh, quality guidelines. Uh, you could become a quality, uh, you know, you could become a quality person and know firsthand, but I do think it's going to become more and more important as time goes on. And I don't think it's, I think it's a good direction to have some kind of credibility of what people are saying online. So you can, you can trust what they're saying. I mean, I remember when no one would put a credit card in a website online, right?

Yeah. Like, and that trust has been built up, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's it. That's the 10, uh, Google eat busting 10 of the biggest misconceptions. Again, Lily Ray, Patif to you. Um, that was a wonderful article to kind of get us refocused on eat again, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Um, that is the, the content for this podcast. I, you know, if you are enjoying this podcast, we really, and it's been a while, so, um, maybe you haven't thought about this in a while. Yeah. We'd really appreciate it if you went and left us a review. Uh, we appreciate that quite a bit. Did you, do you remember the, uh, well, eat of your digital.com forward slash review. We'll take you. Cool. You made sure that happened. He was like, you are not saying G plus. Oh, I said it ever again. I said it. I just, no more of your web style. It was great in the nineties. It was great in the nineties. It was great in the nineties. It was, it was a bang. It was, it was, it was hot. It was hot in the nineties. Yeah. Well, um, we want to thank you guys. You guys have made us the most popular SEO podcast. One of the most popular internet marketing podcasts in the known universe. We really appreciate you. Uh, so thank you. Thank you guys for tuning in. Uh, we should be picking up our schedule more. Hopefully, uh, the theory is Matt can't get COVID again. Right. So that's a good theory. Um, he may actually be writing another Forbes article. There may be another book, bestselling book in the works. Like there's a couple of those things going on, but yeah, we, I'm talking to search engine journals, so I might be writing for them. So, uh, so we really appreciate you guys and, and want to thank you guys for tuning in. And we would appreciate a review. If you can leave one, ewrdigital.com forward slash review. Anything else, Matt? No, that's it. Sounds good.

All right. Until the next podcast. My name is Chris Burris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.