Google’s John Mueller offered an overview of EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) at the Search Central Live NYC event and affirmed why it matters for some sites and why it’s not something SEOs can add to a website.
EEAT’s Relation To Quality Raters And YMYL Websites
John Mueller started this part of his discussion by explicitly tying the concept to its use as a way for the third party quality raters to provide a more objective judgment about the quality of the search results. He did not say that EEAT was created for SEOs to use as a ranking factor guide, in fact he expressly said that’s not how it works.
What is especially notable is that Mueller says that EEAT comes into play algorithmically for sites that are in topics that affect health or finance, what Google terms Your Money Or Your Life (YMYL) topics.
This is what he said, according to my notes, which contains some paraphrasing:
“EEAT is one of the ways that we look at page quality. EEAT is experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. And this is something that we tell the third party quality raters to watch out for when they’re doing page quality evaluation and something that we take into account when we think the query or a set of pages is on a specific topic where it’s more critical, where we call them your money, your life pages. Where we think that the user actually needs to have something that they can rely on and some signs that they can rely on the content that is present.”
EEAT Is Not Something You Add To Web Pages
In his follow-up statements he dismissed the idea that an SEO can add EEAT to their web pages. EEAT is not something you can add to a website. That’s not how it works. So if adding EEAT is part of what you do for SEO, stop. That’s not SEO.
This is what Mueller said:
“Sometimes SEOs come to us or like mention that they’ve added EEAT to their web pages. That’s not how it works. Sorry, you can’t sprinkle some experiences on your web pages. It’s like, that’s that doesn’t make any sense.”
