SEO people continue to debate about E-A-T but Google has been clear and consistent

[djbaxter]

It seems no matter how much or how often Google tells us that E-A-T is not a ranking factor, this is a myth that just won't die.

John Mueller repeated this yet again last week:

Google Says It Doesn't Explicitly Measure EAT In Search
by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable
June 22, 2010

Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that Google Search does not explicitly measure E-A-T in search. John was asked about which signals does Google use to measure E-A-T and John said "that's not something we'd explicitly measure for Search -- it's a concept we wrote about in our Quality Rater's guidelines." ....

Google has been telling us this about E-A-T, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, for a long time. In 2019, Google said they don't have an EAT score. In early 2020, Google said it's systems don't look for EAT but later in 2020, Google said it hopes its system does align with EAT.

So what does this actually mean, for those still in doubt?

E-A-T is just a simple way of describing pages that Google would like to rank first, all things being equal. It's not a Google metric. It's not a metric at all. It's simply a set of guidelines for trying to increase the quality of your content and the quality of Google search results.

Read more...