Google’s EEAT Done Right

Google instructs its human quality raters to apply “EEAT” when evaluating a page on search results. “Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness” are quality indicators, per Google.

Google cites EEAT in its documentation, prompting many search engine marketers to advertise “EEAT optimization” services. Unfortunately, I’ve seen tactics that fabricate EEAT with fake authors, bios, and experience.

Moreover, many marketers claim better EEAT can overcome losses from Google’s “helpful content” ranking algorithm. Yet Google has offered no such recovery method.

Humans, not Algorithms

The rise of “EEAT optimization” services has reached the search giant. In the January 2025 update to its quality guidelines (PDF), Google instructs raters to detect fake authors, fake profile pictures, and fake expertise via:

A webpage or website with “fake” owner or content creator profiles. For example, AI generated content with made up “author” profiles (AI generated images or deceptive creator descriptions) in order to make it appear that the content is written by people.

Factually inaccurate and deceptive information about creator expertise. For example, an author or creator profile inaccurately claims to have credentials or expertise (e.g., the content creator claims falsely to be a medical professional) to make the content appear more trustworthy than it is.

The update — I added the bold words — confirms Google recognizes the problem of fake EEAT credentials and encourages raters to be on the lookout.

EEAT is for human evaluators. It’s not a direct algorithmic ranking factor. Beware of services that promise otherwise.

Instead, ensure your EEAT components are prominent and thorough. Most businesses overlook the opportunity and fail to disclose one or more of the following:

• Founder(s) name, experience, education, awards, and achievements.
• Collaborating companies (entities), such as key customers and vendors.
• Citations and links in blog posts and marketing materials.
• Links to the business’s social media profiles (containing key company details)
• Genuine reviews or verifiable testimonials
• Detailed contact info (mail, physical, and email addresses; phone number), not solely a generic contact form.

Include structured data markup (such as Organization schema) to help search engines and AI platforms access the above details.

Trust and authority are commonsense qualities of any reputable business, not just those looking for organic search visibility. Nonetheless, demonstrate to search engines, genAI platforms, and humans by:

• Hiring or collaborating with knowledgeable writers and experts.
• Investing in authority-driven content, such as research and surveys.
• Keeping social media profiles active and engaging.

In short, EEAT may not directly improve organic search rankings. But fabricating the components will likely cause long-term harm. Consumers buy from authentic and honest businesses. Those qualities drive engagement and conversions.

How To Apply E-E-A-T To Your Site & Boost On-Page SEO via @sejournal, @xandervalencia

To crack down on misinformation in content and enforce quality guidelines, Google came up with the concept of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, or E-E-A-T (previously E-A-T).

This emerged out of their Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which emphasize the importance of providing users with reliable, valuable, and accurate information and a great website experience.

If you give users what they want, and they trust you enough to keep coming back, Google is more likely to reward you in terms of rankings and traffic.

These concepts hold the most weight when it comes to Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content – brands that provide information related to people’s health, finances, and well-being. This content must be reliable and fact-checked.

Quality Content, Care, And User Experience

When it comes to E-E-A-T, your top priority should be creating content that your target audience wants or needs – content that offers true value.

Your content should also be accessible, easy to navigate, and adhere to high standards of accuracy and reliability.

Creating these pages for your website should help it perform better in Google’s search results.

And, yes, this is much easier said than done. First, you must have a clear understanding of what Google means by “high-quality content.”

What Is High-Quality Content?

Whatever content you create must have a purpose. Your content must benefit your clients, customers, users, or readers.

Common Traits Of High-Quality Pages

According to the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, high-quality pages are those that have:

• High levels of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
• A satisfying amount of high-quality main content, including a descriptive or helpful title.
• Satisfying website information and information about who is responsible for the website (for shopping pages or those that enable financial transactions, this includes satisfying customer service information).
• Placement on a website that has a strong reputation for being one of the best resources for information on the topic.
• A positive reputation for the creator of the main content, if different from that of the website.

The highest quality pages (including YMYL pages) will have an extremely high level of E-E-A-T, according to Google’s guidelines.

What Is Low-Quality Content?

Low-quality content is, as you’d expect, the exact opposite of high-quality content.

As Google puts it:

“Websites or pages without some sort of beneficial purpose, including pages that are created with no attempt to help users, or pages that potentially spread hate, cause harm, or misinform or deceive users, should receive the Lowest rating.”

If high-quality content helps your site rank higher, it logically follows that low-quality pages could hurt your Google rankings.

If your content is inaccurate, has no purpose, or includes elements that hurt the user experience, it’s unlikely that Google will feature your website prominently in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Common Traits Of A Low-Quality Page

Here are the characteristics of a low-quality page, according to Google’s guidelines:

• The page has an inadequate level of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
• The quality of the main content is low.
• There is an unsatisfying amount of main content for the purpose of the page.
• The title is exaggerated or shocking.
• Ads or secondary content distracts from the main content.
• There is an unsatisfying amount of website information or information about the creator of the content for the purpose of the page (no good reason for anonymity).
• The website or the content creator has a mildly negative reputation based on extensive reputation research.

In short, low E-E-A-T means bad content. Bad content means bad SEO, and bad SEO means you’re missing out on valuable traffic and conversions due to low rankings.

E-E-A-T In The Age Of Generative AI

Generative AI (Gen AI) has transformed content creation in a major way.

AI tools make it easier than ever to generate content at high volumes, and some use AI to mass-produce low-quality content that risks misinformation and generic insights.

To prioritize E-E-A-T, brands should create content backed by credible resources, research, and real-world expertise.

Gen AI can be useful in some respects, but you should never outsource your thoughts and insight to an AI tool.

Brands that publish original thought and prioritize human insight and expertise are in a better position to rank in search than those who rely on generative AI alone.

How To Improve Your Website’s E-E-A-T

So, how can you make sure your website content is high quality and also boost your on-page SEO efforts?

Here are some best practices to follow when creating new content.

1. Identify Your Authors With A Byline And Bio

Think about the last time you landed on a blog where some content was published by “Admin” or some random guy with no last name. Did you trust that site? Was the content amazing? No and no.

Google’s guidelines advise creating articles with “journalistic professionalism.”

Part of that professionalism means every piece of content you publish should have the writer’s name – their byline – attached to it.

Here’s how Search Engine Journal highlights the bylines of its articles:

Screenshot of Roger Montti’s author byline, Search Engine Journal, February 2025

Identify All Your Content Contributors

Ideally, you should highlight the biographical details of every person who creates content for you – whether that’s blog posts, articles, or question-and-answer pages.

Is the author of your content a recognized expert in your field? Then you definitely want to highlight that.

You can do so on a separate bio page that also contains the author’s past content, or you can even put it at the bottom of the article.

Search Engine Journal does both. At the bottom of any of its articles, you’ll see an author’s box.

Clicking on [Read full bio] leads to the full bio page with information that establishes who the author is and what they do:

Screenshot of Roger Montti’s profile, Search Engine Journal, February 2025

In this example, Search Engine Journal highlights that the author, Roger Montti, brings “25 years hands-on experience in SEO,” “recently presented at Pubcon” (a reputable marketing conference), and “served as a Head Judge at the U.S. Search Awards.”

This bio clearly establishes Montti as a subject matter expert and authority when it comes to talking about (and writing about) SEO, which provides E-E-A-T to Search Engine Journal’s articles.

What To Include On A Bio Page

Here are some essential elements of a good bio page:

• Full name.
• Headshot.
• Title/position.
• A detailed bio.
• Contact information (e.g., email form, social media).

Doing all of this makes it easy for users (and Google) to know who created the content and assess their individual E-E-A-T.

2. Make Your Contact Info Easy To Find

When visitors arrive on your landing pages, is it easy to find your contact information?

Can they quickly determine how to get customer support?

Remember, E-E-A-T evaluates your website as a whole. The easiest solution is to make sure you link to your About Us and Contact Us pages in either your main or footer navigation.

If you don’t have those pages on your website, make them now!

3. Remove Or Improve Your Low-Quality Content

If you have content that is no longer useful – or is just so terrible that it’s not worth the time investment to update or improve it – then pruning that content is one quick way to improve your E-E-A-T.

You’ll need to decide whether to improve or remove your old or outdated content.

Removing content should always be your last resort, but if it needs to be done, do it without hesitation.

Ideally, you want to identify any content that looks like it has low E-E-A-T and figure out ways you can reverse that.

Here are some ways you could increase E-E-A-T on old content:

• Have a more authoritative person write the content.
• Add quotes from experts, data, sources, or citations.
• Make some simple edits to improve the readability, grammar, spelling, and structure.
• Add more information to make it more comprehensive.
• Write a new and better title.
• Add some visual appeal, such as photos, charts, and screenshots (and make sure to optimize those images).
• Add a video for people who prefer that format vs. text only (this has the added benefit of potentially keeping visitors on your site longer).

The process of elevating content definitely takes longer, but doing so will greatly improve your website’s E-E-A-T and performance. This process is especially crucial for any YMYL page.

4. Create A Positive Brand Reputation

A positive brand reputation is key to growing both your business and your E-E-A-T.

One way you can do this is through thought leadership by sharing insights that your target audience truly finds valuable.

High-quality thought leadership content is good for winning, keeping, and growing a business. It will also help you build authority in your niche and help Google trust you.

Thought leadership is incredibly powerful when done right, but to get it right, it needs expertise, experience and authority – all the things that represent E-E-A-T.

What’s Good For The User

Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?

That is the wrong question to ask, in my opinion. Let’s forget about ranking factors for a moment and think about your audience instead.

If you’re doing everything outlined in Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines, then you’re creating informative, useful, high-quality content that your audience wants and helping them accomplish a task (e.g., acquiring knowledge, buying a product).

In other words, you’re providing a satisfying user experience.

Anything good for users is good for helping you be visible in Google – and driving the traffic and conversions you really want.

More Resources:

Featured Image: insta_photos/Shutterstock

‘Helpful Content’ per Google’s Latest Guidelines

Last month I addressed Google’s updated guidelines for its quality raters, the thousands of people who manually review websites.

I explained Google’s emphasis on EEAT — the author’s Expertise and Experience and the site’s Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

Yet the guidelines (PDF) go beyond EEAT with instructions to determine a page’s quality. Google’s definition of “quality” is critical for search optimizers because its core search algorithm now includes a “helpful content” component.

The updated guidelines provide insights.

Helpful Content

Effort and originality

Google’s guidelines state a page’s main content depends on the goal and industry. The raters should determine the page’s goal and then evaluate whether the content achieves it. Financial institutions, the guidelines add as an example, differ from hobbyists’ sites.

Pages with vague or no goals deserve the lowest rating.

Raters should assign a quality rating of the main content based on effort and originality.

• “Effort” reflects whether a page provides positive user experiences, such as translating a German poem into English.

• “Originality” means adding new content instead of repurposing others’. The guidelines encourage raters to open more articles on top Google search results and check their similarity. The most unique and original should rank higher, per the guidelines, which state:

MC [main content] should add value compared to similar pages on the web.

An example of low-effort content is “best” lists based on existing reviews and lists with little added value.

Placement

According to Google’s guidelines, owners and creators should display the most helpful and essential content prominently — near the top of the page — so visitors can immediately access it.

Content that supports the page’s purpose without directly contributing to the goal can be valuable but placed in a lower, less prominent position. For example,

on recipe pages, the recipe itself and important supporting content directly related to the recipe should be prominently displayed near the top of the webpage.

The guidelines included an example of what not to do, citing a butterbeer recipe page that starts with a story of a family going to Universal Studios to try the beer that inspired the recipe — instead of leading with the recipe itself.

Accuracy

The guidelines repeatedly focus on what Google calls “Your Money or Your Life” topics, those that affect a person’s health, safety, financial stability, and well-being. The raters are to review YMYL pages more closely, checking factual accuracy as well as consistency with experts.

I advise clients to confirm YMYL claims with reputable sources and, when possible, quote them in the piece.

Filler

Google asks raters to assign pages as low-quality if there’s excessive content that prevents readers from quickly finding the information they came for. An example filler page, according to the guidelines, offers:

tutorial instructions on how to make a basic craft and lots of unhelpful “filler” at the top, such as commonly known facts about the supplies needed or other non-crafting information.

Filler can result in a poor experience for people who visit the page, especially if placed prominently ahead of helpful content for the purpose of the page.

Misleading titles

Google considers title tags as main content since they often appear in search results.

The guidelines instruct raters to label exaggerated or shocking titles as low quality, and misleading titles as the very lowest, offering this example of “exaggerated”:

A page titled “Eat the Healthiest Foods in the WORLD to Extend Your Life!!!!” for a list of tips on how to add more fruits and vegetables to meals.

Intrusive ads

Despite rumors and assumptions, Google doesn’t consider ads on a page as a red flag, stating:

The presence or absence of Ads alone is not a consideration for page quality rating.

However, ads send unhelpful signals when they prevent visitors from interacting with the main content.

Per the guidelines, this page should receive the lowest rating:

The MC [main content] is deliberately obstructed or obscured due to Ads, SC, interstitial pages, download links, or other content that is beneficial to the website owner but not necessarily the website visitor.

And this page should receive a low rating:

The Ads or SC [Supplementary Content, such as navigation links or content behind tabs] significantly distract from or interrupt the use of the MC.

Google also instructs raters to assign the lowest ratings to pages that deceptively hide ads or disguise them as main content, navigation links, or contextual links.

How to Help

It’s possible none of these rating guidelines directly impact rankings, but they inform us of Google’s priorities.

In short:

• Make sure a page’s purpose is clear.

• Display the critical info prominently, typically at the top of the page. Avoid filler content that doesn’t serve the page’s goal or purpose.

• Add unique value. Product pages, for example, could include sizing charts, comparisons, and Q&As. Pages with vendor lists should include the author’s experiences with those products.

• Solve the searcher’s intent fast and efficiently. Include additional value cautiously and less prominently.

• Avoid pop-ups or other elements that make pages hard to use

• For YMYL topics, cite trusted sources and include quotes from experts.

‘Your Money or Your Life,’ Defined by Google

Google hires human teams to review the search results for various queries and assign quality ratings for each ranking URL. Google says the purpose is to help ensure helpful content for searchers.

The ratings do not impact search results directly, but Google’s guidelines for the human raters suggest its ranking priorities — what it looks for — and algorithmic scrutiny.

Here’s Google’s video explainer:

Google updated the guidelines (PDF) last week.

A recurring focus is what Google calls “Your Money or Your Life” topics, which can include ecommerce. Google’s human raters are to review YMYL pages more closely.

YMYL Topics

Your Money or Your Life topics affect a person’s health, safety, financial stability, and well-being.

Some pages clearly fall into that category; others are not as straightforward. Google provides a few examples in the latest guidelines.

YMYL and EEAT

Sites that provide health- or money-related advice or sell products that can affect health or wealth must have clear signs of (i) high-level expertise and (ii) first-hand experience with the topic.

The guidelines provide much detail on how the raters should assess EEAT — the Expertise and Experience of the author and the Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness of the site — by reviewing these elements:

• Contact page (with the address) or customer support page (important for online stores that process payments).

• About page detailing the business’s history, milestones, awards, and achievements. The Organization schema type can help search engines extract the essential info.

• Shipping and return policies, terms of service, cookie policy, privacy policy.

• Detailed author profiles describing expertise and experience.

• Positive branded search results that reflect the business’s reputation. Google encourages raters to search for the site and author names.

• Original “opinion” or “expert” content.

• Detailed methodology for product reviews.

• Citations from trusted sources (government, official) on content pages.

Google also lists elements that should not be considered for evaluating EEAT:

• Ads (unless they prevent visitors from reading or engaging with a page).
• Broken links (unless excessive).

None of those EEAT elements are confirmed algorithm factors; Google includes them in the guidelines to assist human evaluators. The factors are Google’s definition of EEAT and presumably have a ranking role — algorithmic or manual — for all sites, especially YMYL-focused.