The EAT update brought down a lot of websites to their knees. Many bloggers who had enjoyed the benefits of a huge traffic volume suddenly found themselves at the mercy of this new update.
I want to share how you can safeguard yourself, and your blog from the EAT update with you today. It is a major release that can affect your site, especially so if you belong to the industries that Google targeted in this release.
By the end of this tutorial, you will have a clear view of the EAT update and what you can do to prevent the algorithm from negatively impacting your website.
What is the EAT Update?
The EAT update is an acronym that stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and expertise. People in the blogging industry also refer to it as the “Medic” update.
It is related to another acronym, the YMYL. It means Your Money, Your Life.
So, what is this all about?
Google does not only care about the quality of information that it serves its users. It now concerns itself about the source of information. One of the problems in the world today is that websites spring up like mushrooms every day.
Thus, there is a growing concern about the accuracy of information found in the millions of websites on the web. This problem with accuracy is most critical in areas that involve:
- Money
- Health
- Safety
Because of this Google decided that if it ranks websites, it will only show websites where the owners or authors have:
- Expertise
- Authoritativeness
- Trustworthiness
This is how Google weeds out websites that misinform people. So, the EAT update is one that pretty much checks the credibility of websites that have something to do with anything about your money and your life.
Pretty much, it is about everything.
Many websites got devastated. When the update was released, there were many sites whose traffic dwindled by 50%. Google thought that these sites were not expert enough, not authoritative enough, and not trustworthy enough.
This can happen to you, too, unless you protect your website against the EAT update.
Ways to Safeguard Your Website from Google’s Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (E-A-T) Update
Now, let us talk about the ways with which you can protect yourself. These are things that you either have to check or change in how your website is currently set up.
1. Review your website’s purpose
Google hates spammers and anything sketchy. If your website has no real purpose but to monetize, spam, and scam people, you have to think twice.
Here are some tips:
- If you are buying backlinks, stop this immediately
- If your site has more ads than actual content, remove the ads
- If your articles are too short or if they do not add value, revise them
Your website must serve a purpose that is aligned with Google’s goals.
Your website must:
- Share helpful information to the users
- Be accurate, honest, and not hateful
- Entertain, provide knowledge or opinion, or make legitimate products and services available
If your site does not fulfill any of these, Google will hit you with its EAT update. You will not meet its standard for being someone trustworthy.
2. Validate if you are an expert
Are you an expert in any specific field? How do you prove this, and what industries are affected? The YMYL update covers a wide array of topics.
These are:
- News – websites that cover politics and current events
- Finance – any website that provides advice on financial matters like investments, stocks, real estate, and insurances.
- Shopping – any website that sells something
- Health and safety – any website that offers information about personal security, cybersecurity, and anything related to health.
As you can see, all these categories pretty much cover everything. Even if you have a hobby-related blog, it still belongs to the category where a person’s health or money may be compromised.
So, what should you do?
You have to create an “About Us” or “About Me” page. On this page, put your credentials, and tell people who you are. You have to provide adequate credentials, so Google will consider you an expert and show your content at the top of its search engine results pages (SERPs).
Your “About Me” page also addresses the issue of authoritativeness. You are an authority if you have the experience and the credentials to back up your claims. For example, if you are writing about health like cancer, you have to be a doctor to be credible.
If your website is about aquariums, do you even have your own aquarium?
For hobbies, it is a tad difficult to establish authority. But what you can do is to start building your backlinks. Create social media pages that tell people about your expertise—aquariums.
Google will one day find out about the linkage between these social media pages and your blog, and you will not be branded as someone who has no authority.
3. Check the quality of your content
Google has long addressed the problem of poor content. It all started when Google ensured that pages will not be ranked merely based on keywords.
Today, Google measures a lot of things to identify whether your content is adding value to your users or not.
Here are some examples:
- Bounce rate – the rate by which a person exits your website from the same page he came in; it means that he did not visit your other pages.
- Average session duration – the average length of time users spend on your website; a long session duration means that the users are reading your content.
- Pages per session – the number of pages that person visited on your site per session. A session is how much time it takes until there is 30-minutes of inactivity. If the person visited many pages before becoming inactive for 30 minutes, it means that your content is great.
As you can see, Google will prioritize websites with great content on the SERPs. If you have great content, it simply means that you are believable and credible, and you are meeting the expectations of EAT.
The problem you will have here is that it is difficult to produce high-quality content unless you are really a writer. You are better off hiring an affordable, high-quality freelance writer to do it for you—someone who understands EAT and SEO.
You cannot risk this. Do not experiment with content. Each day that passes by where your content does not meet Google’s expectation is another day where you are digging a deeper hole for your website’s grave.
Summary: Google’s expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness
We can say that EAT pretty much affected all industries. For as long as your website is about a person’s money and happiness, Google is going to re-evaluate your site.
Protect yourself and help your site grow its traffic. Work on your SEO and do not commit the most common SEO mistakes.
Ensure that when Google crawls your site, you project an image that you are trustworthy and an expert.
Today, I want you to look at the various EAT components and then check if your website is meeting these standards. If not, you better start working now because Google is not going to wait for you.
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