More and more Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) are becoming the standard by which content on the web is being judged.

That idea itself comes from Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines, a north star set of principles given to their quality raters to help them judge the usefulness of sample sets of search results…and ultimately to help inform and steer algorithms that aim to serve the best results to users.

Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) pages were the initial target for these guidelines, but it’s becoming more apparent that E-A-T is here to stay and that it can be used to help improve the usefulness of all kinds of search results. Therefore, it’s in all website owner’s best interest to know & live by E-A-T guidelines.

While it’s still largely about links (See tweet from Marie Haynes below), like Google’s original PageRank patent, it’s much less about the hacked, easily gained link meant to game Google’s algo as it is about the authentic recommendation from sources that carry sway on your topic.

I asked Gary about E-A-T. He said it's largely based on links and mentions on authoritative sites. i.e. if the Washington post mentions you, that's good.

He recommended reading the sections in the QRG on E-A-T as it outlines things well.@methode #Pubcon

— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) February 21, 2018

Bottom line: do things worth writing about & have authorities in your space mention them.

And again, if you want to Up Your SEO Game, watch my playlists (Curated with love from my heart to yours) and drop me a line on my YouTube Community Tab to connect: