E-E-A-T has replaced the E-A-T in Google search quality rater guidelines. EEAT is the new way website owners need to plan their sites for Google SEO if they wish to be considered by the search quality experts to rank their sites higher in Google search results.
What is E-A-T?
Google E-A-T guidelines have been around for a long time which guide their search ranking system and have been a core aspect that dramatically influences search engine results.
E-A-T Stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness which are the three pillars of the core foundation which guides Google quality raters and thereby influences Google search results.
What is E-E-A-T?
Now Google has decided to add another E to these EAT guidelines which have been around for a long time now. Extra E stands for experience. They like to call these the new E-E-A-T or double E-A-T guidelines!
So E-E-A-T stands for
- E – Experience- Does the content creator have needed experience for the topic
- E – Expertise – Does the content creator have the needed knowledge or skill for the topic
- A – Authoritativeness – is the website the go-to source for the topic
- T – Trust – Is the page accurate, honest, safe, and reliable.
Even if the site has E-E-A, they say Trust is still the most important out of the three. You can read the newly updated search rater guidelines PDF that will help you improve the SEO of your website.
Why Need for Experience in E-E-A-T?
As a large number of affiliate sites continue to fill up the Google search results, there was an urgent need for Google to filter affiliate marketing sites that had no experience in using these products but were just targeting affiliate high paying keywords and high-paying affiliate programs to drive searching in traffic to their sites and earn huge affiliate commissions.
This had become a huge way to make money online by creating micro niche affiliate websites, and doing high-quality SEO which can be easily done using keyword research tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs to drive targeted search traffic and earn affiliate commissions.
See how Google Search Raters make Google search results better
Experience and EEAT Google Guidelines
The experience factor which they incorporated into the search engine results now will more emphasis on the fact that the author has actually used the product and is sharing their experience and not just putting up product listings for affiliate sales.
And do note that they could have made it E-A-T-E, but they decided to keep the experience as the first E, which means that it has a higher weightage compared to the E-A-T guidelines before.
For example, if you want to upgrade your computer, you are not just looking for product listings for affiliate commissions but actually, are looking for someone who has actually upgraded their computer and is sharing PC parts that they have actually used and learned from the experience whether they are good or bad.
I think it is a great idea to add the experience part to the EEAT guidelines and this will help search quality raters better qualify and identify the sites and overlook pure made-for affiliate websites, enabling them to rank useful sites higher in search engine rankings.
It is also becoming a challenge for search engines as people use AI-generated content and AI-generated images which might showcase experiences from the AI. However, AI detection is getting easier.
How are you working on your site EEAT?