The Medic Core Algorithm Update - August 1, 2018

[Marie Haynes]

I'll second what Callum said. We like SEMRush for seeing patterns and for the most part it's accurate in showing us when something significant changed. However, the estimates of traffic numbers are often way off.

Also, often we'll see that slight changes in traffic aren't picked up well by SEMRush, especially for smaller sites.

 

[vvo]

You may find the preliminary results of my research useful.

 

[Marie Haynes]

Interesting. Question for you: How did you establish whether a site has E-A-T? Was it based primarily on the expertise of authors on the site?

 

[vvo]

Hi, Marie!
E-A-T model include amount of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness:

● The expertise of the creator of the MC.
● The authoritativeness of the creator of the MC, the MC itself, and the website.
● The trustworthiness of the creator of the MC, the MC itself, and the website.

In each of these criteria [expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness], we use a points' system to calculate the overall site E-A-T ratio.
The points' system allows you to compare sites with each other.
We checked the authoritativeness and possible level of trustworthiness in the site as well.

The main conclusion that E-A-T is not an independent ranking signal. This is only a concept or a list of principles.

If the site has critical trustworthiness issues, such as hacking, this will certainly affect the ranking, but that’s other story ...

 

[Marie Haynes]

Interesting. We've played around with creating an "E-A-T" score, but I felt it would be so hard to do as things vary so much in different verticals. I'd love to hear more about your methodology in creating this score if you are willing to share more about it!

 

[vvo]

Hi, Marie!

According to Google rater guidelines when a high level of authoritativeness or expertise is needed, the reputation of a website should be judged on what expert opinions have to say.

Reputation is an important criterion when using the High rating, and informs the E-A-T of the page.

High quality pages have the following characteristics:... Positive website reputation for a website that is responsible for the MC on the page. Positive reputation of the creator of the MC, if different from that of the website.

Here is how to research the reputation of the website:
1. Identify the “homepage” of the website. For example, for the IBM website, ibm.com is the homepage. You may need to identify the creator of the content, if it is different from that of the overall website.
2. Using ibm.com as an example, try one or more of the following searches on Google:

● [ibm -site:ibm.com]: A search for IBM that excludes pages on ibm.com.
● [“ibm.com” -site:ibm.com]: A search for “ibm.com” that excludes pages on ibm.com.
● [ibm reviews -site:ibm.com] A search for reviews of IBM that excludes pages on ibm.com.
● [“ibm.com” reviews -site:ibm.com]: A search for reviews of “ibm.com” that excludes pages on ibm.com.
● For content creators, try searching for their name or alias

We use 28 criteria to calculate the overall rating.
To calculate the number of authoritativeness points, we use two criteria:
● Total sum domain and brand (author) mentions.
● Significant difference in number of mentions between your domain and average value of the top 10.

If you need to check many domains for authoritativeness you can use Netpeak Spider.
Links template is

[https://www.google.com.ua/search?q=intext:] [domain or "brand"]+[-site:domain]

Scraping setting:

User agent - Chrome.

 

[Marie Haynes]

Super helpful thanks. We've been doing this type of thing but have been sort of eyeballing the perceived authority, trust issues, etc.

I do like the idea of creating a score. However, I still think this is tricky. For example, for some reviews we do, we may notice that our client has, say 400 mentions in Google news and top ranking sites have a similar number. But, the top ranking sites will have mentions from truly authoritative places, and our client that we are reviewing has mostly press releases.

I suppose this could be overridden by combining other information such as Moz DA, etc. though to come up with some kind of a score.

Great food for thought for sure.

 

[vvo]

Hi, Marie!

● The authoritativeness of the creator of the MC, the MC itself, and the website.

I also thought about using Moz DA to calculate authoritativeness. We do not use it yet, but we will probably. We need to test how difficult it will be to get this data for many sites. The fact is that we do not have a Moz subscription.