Seems Nobody Can Tell You What EEAT Actually Is. So I Will.
Every SEO on LinkedIn is banging on about E-E-A-T. Almost none of them can tell you what it actually means. So let’s fix that.
Hi, I’m Nikki Pilkington. My site is https://nikki-pilkington.com/ and in this episode of "SEO F**king What", I’m taking apart two things you’ve been told matter enormously by people who, if you push them, probably couldn’t tell you where either one came from. E-E-A-T and helpful content. One is a description of what good looks like, written for contractors who can’t touch your rankings. The other stopped existing as a separate thing in March 2024. Neither of them is a score, and nobody can sell you one.
Here’s what I’m covering:
— What the four letters actually stand for, and where the extra E came from in December 2022
— The 180-page free PDF that E-E-A-T lives in, who Google gives it to, and why those people are mystery shoppers rather than traffic wardens
— Why there is no E-E-A-T score sitting in a database marking your website out of 10 — and why it still matters anyway
— Why trust is the one that counts, and how you can have all the expertise in the world and still be worth very little
— YMYL, why a page about chemotherapy is held to a stricter standard than a page about scented candles, and where a small B2B business actually sits
— What happened to the helpful content update, and why anyone offering to recover you from one is selling you a thing that no longer exists
— The three questions Google published for free — who, how and why — and the one that catches everybody out
— Why the E-E-A-T audit grift works so well, and why a headshot and a byline is not expertise
I also give you a proper piece of homework. Not the "might do that one day" kind. The actual do-it-this-week kind. Three pages, three questions.
If you know someone who’s been quoted two grand for an E-E-A-T audit, or who’s been told that adding author schema will conjure expertise out of nowhere, send them this. It might save them an invoice.
Get found. Make money. Stop stressing. Stop paying for a score that doesn’t exist.
Links mentioned:
Non-Wanky SEO Courses — the On-Page SEO Toolkit is completely free right now: https://nonwankyseo.com
Google’s own "Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content" page — this is the free thing with the who/how/why questions on it: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content
Google announcing the extra E, December 2022 (the Search Quality Rater Guidelines PDF downloads from this page): https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/12/google-raters-guidelines-e-e-a-t
Google folding the helpful content system into the core algorithm, March 2024: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies
Episode 15 — the AI search audit racket:
Episode 18 — auditing your whole site page by page: https://seofuckingwhatpodcast.co.uk/episode/you-havent-read-your-own-website-have-you-time-for-a-content-audit
Follow Nikki:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikkipilkington/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikkipilkington/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/nikkipilkington.bsky.social
Mentioned in this episode:
ICN Network
Transcript
Every SEO on LinkedIn is banging on about E-E-A-T.
Speaker:Almost none of them can tell you what it actually means.
Speaker:So let's fix that.
Speaker:This is SEO Fucking What. I'm Nikki, 30 years in SEO, which
Speaker:means I was doing this before
Speaker:it had a name, before it had acronyms, and long before anyone worked out
Speaker:you could sell a course on it.
Speaker:Today I want to talk about E-E-A-T and helpful content.
Speaker:Two things you've been told matter enormously by people who, if you
Speaker:push them, probably couldn't tell you where either one came from.
Speaker:By the end of this, you'll know what E-E-A-T actually is, who it's for, what
Speaker:the helpful content thing really is now, and three things you can go and do
Speaker:this week that will actually make a difference.
Speaker:10 minutes.
Speaker:Let's go.
Speaker:So what exactly is E-E-A-T?
Speaker:It's experience, expertise,
Speaker:authoritativeness,
Speaker:trustworthiness.
Speaker:That's the four.
Speaker:It used to be E-A-T, just three letters.
Speaker:And Google added on the extra E in about December 2022. Experience.
Speaker:We'll come back to that one because it's the most useful letter in the
Speaker:whole lot for a small business.
Speaker:But where does E-E-A-T come from?
Speaker:It comes from a document called the Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
Speaker:It's a real thing and it's free.
Speaker:It's about 180 pages of PDF, and you can download it from Google's own developer
Speaker:website. And Google gives that document to thousands of contractors around the world.
Speaker:Those people are called quality raters.
Speaker:Their job is to sit there day in, day out, being shown a search query
Speaker:and a webpage and grading how good a result that page is for the query.
Speaker:Sounds like a pretty interesting job. Before you start worrying, quality
Speaker:raters can't touch your rankings.
Speaker:Not one tiny bit.
Speaker:A quality rater can't rank you.
Speaker:Can't derank you, can't penalise you,
Speaker:can't flag your site for a slap.
Speaker:They're not sitting there with a big red pen and a grudge
Speaker:against your web design business.
Speaker:They're mystery shoppers, really.
Speaker:They go round, they eat the dinner, they fill in the form,
Speaker:they send it back to head office.
Speaker:Head office reads a few thousand of those forms and decides
Speaker:whether to change the recipe.
Speaker:Nobody's taking your dinner away from you.
Speaker:So when somebody tells you that E-E-A-T is a ranking factor, they're wrong.
Speaker:There's no E-E-A-T score.
Speaker:There's no number sitting in a database somewhere marking your website out
Speaker:of 10 for authoritativeness. It doesn't exist.
Speaker:What it actually is: a description of what good looks like.
Speaker:Google wrote down what it wants its results to be like, handed that
Speaker:description to the raters, and then its engineers use the resulting scores
Speaker:to work out whether an algorithm change makes the results better or
Speaker:worse, which means it does matter.
Speaker:Google is actively trying to build a system that rewards the
Speaker:stuff that raters mark highly.
Speaker:It just doesn't matter in the way you've been sold it.
Speaker:Now, trust is the one that counts.
Speaker:Google's own guidelines say this, more or less
Speaker:in these words: trust is the most important of the four.
Speaker:The other three exist to support it.
Speaker:So think about that for a second, because it changes the whole job.
Speaker:You can be the most experienced person in your industry and
Speaker:still not be trustworthy.
Speaker:You can have loads of expertise, but no contact details, no
Speaker:company number, no prices.
Speaker:A stock photo of a woman in a headset who works for Shutterstock.
Speaker:That's expertise with no trust, and it's worth very little.
Speaker:And the whole thing scales with stakes.
Speaker:There's another acronym here, sorry, but this one's worth knowing.
Speaker:YMYL.
Speaker:It means your money, your life, which covers medical advice, financial advice,
Speaker:legal advice, anything to do with safety.
Speaker:Google applies a much higher bar to those pages, and rightly so.
Speaker:A page about which chemotherapy to have should be held to a stricter standard
Speaker:than a page about scented candles.
Speaker:If you're a small B2B services business, you're somewhere in the middle.
Speaker:You are not YMYL.
Speaker:So relax slightly, but you are asking people to hand over money
Speaker:on the strength of a website.
Speaker:So no, you don't get to ignore it.
Speaker:Now let's look at the helpful content thing.
Speaker:In August 2022, Google launched something it called the helpful content update.
Speaker:It was aimed squarely at sites churning out content for search
Speaker:engines rather than for humans.
Speaker:It did another one in September 2023, and then in March 2024, in the
Speaker:core update, Google folded the whole helpful content system into the core
Speaker:algorithm. Which means if anyone offers to recover you from a helpful content
Speaker:update, that separate thing they're talking about doesn't exist anymore.
Speaker:It's not a switch that got flipped, it got absorbed.
Speaker:It's just Google.
Speaker:Now it's part of the machine, but something really useful did come outta
Speaker:it, and it's free and it's sitting on Google's site being ignored by
Speaker:everybody who'd rather sell you an audit.
Speaker:It's the documentation page on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content.
Speaker:And the best bit of it is three questions.
Speaker:Who, how and why?
Speaker:So who created this content?
Speaker:Can a reader tell?
Speaker:Is there a name on it?
Speaker:Is there any indication a human being with a job and an opinion was involved?
Speaker:How was it made?
Speaker:If AI was involved,
Speaker:is that obvious or is it hidden?
Speaker:If you tested something, how did you test it?
Speaker:If you reviewed a product, did you actually touch the product?
Speaker:And why?
Speaker:Why does this exist?
Speaker:And this is the one that catches everybody out.
Speaker:Was this page made to help someone, or was it made to rank on Google?
Speaker:If the honest answer is to rank, you've already got your problem.
Speaker:That's the whole helpful content thing in one question.
Speaker:Content written primarily for search engines is the thing being targeted. Not
Speaker:badly written content or short content.
Speaker:Content that's written for the wrong audience.
Speaker:Now, let's look at the grift. E-E-A-T audits. £2,000 for a spreadsheet that tells
Speaker:you to add author boxes, author schema.
Speaker:Somebody will tell you that adding person markup to your pages creates E-E-A-T.
Speaker:It doesn't. Google's own people have said this so many
Speaker:times they must be sick of it.
Speaker:Structured data is fine.
Speaker:I'm not telling you to rip it out.
Speaker:It just isn't a magic spell
Speaker:that conjures expertise from nowhere.
Speaker:A headshot and a byline is not expertise.
Speaker:It's a headshot and a byline, mate.
Speaker:And the reason this particular grift works so well is that
Speaker:E-E-A-T is just four abstract nouns.
Speaker:You can't measure it. If you can't measure it,
Speaker:nobody can ever prove that the agency didn't deliver it.
Speaker:I did a whole episode on the AI search audit version of
Speaker:this racket back in episode 15.
Speaker:If you wanna hear me get really ranty about an invoice, listen to that one.
Speaker:It's the same trick, just different letters.
Speaker:So if there's no score, no audit, and no magic markup, what can you
Speaker:actually do about any of this?
Speaker:Three things.
Speaker:All of them doable this week.
Speaker:None of them costing you two grand. Right after this.
Speaker:Three takeaways.
Speaker:All you're gonna need.
Speaker:One, put a human name on it.
Speaker:That's the who question answered. A real name on your content.
Speaker:A real bio, real credentials, and a link to somewhere that person actually exists.
Speaker:LinkedIn.
Speaker:A professional body, a company page.
Speaker:Not the team, not admin, not nothing.
Speaker:If you wrote it, sign it.
Speaker:You've been doing this for however many years.
Speaker:Say so.
Speaker:Number two, add the bit that only you could have written.
Speaker:That's the extra E. Experience. And it's the single biggest advantage
Speaker:you have over every AI-generated competitor page in your industry.
Speaker:So fucking use it.
Speaker:Get specific. What did you try?
Speaker:What happened?
Speaker:What did it cost?
Speaker:How long did it take?
Speaker:What went wrong?
Speaker:What would you do differently?
Speaker:Name the client if they'll let you. Put the actual number in.
Speaker:An AI can write a competent page about your industry.
Speaker:It cannot invent what happened on Friday afternoon in your office with
Speaker:your clients and how you dealt with it.
Speaker:That's yours.
Speaker:Nobody can copy it.
Speaker:And three, make yourself easy to verify.
Speaker:This is trust, and trust is the one that counts most,
Speaker:remember. Have an address, have your phone number.
Speaker:Have a company number, a real about page with a real face on it.
Speaker:Prices if you can.
Speaker:An honest returns or terms page.
Speaker:Anything that lets a stranger check you're a genuine business run
Speaker:by actual people who can be found.
Speaker:It's the least glamorous work in SEO, but it's the bit that really matters.
Speaker:So here's your homework.
Speaker:Pick your three most important pages, not your blog, your money pages,
Speaker:the ones that bring in enquiries.
Speaker:Read each one and ask Google's three questions out loud.
Speaker:Who made this?
Speaker:How was it made?
Speaker:Why does it exist?
Speaker:Be honest, because you already know the answer.
Speaker:Then take the worst one and do all three of today's takeaways to it.
Speaker:Make sure your name's on it.
Speaker:Make sure that it has experience in it.
Speaker:Make sure the verification stuff is sorted around it.
Speaker:If you want the fuller version of that process,
Speaker:episode 18 walks through auditing your whole site page by page.
Speaker:Today's job is smaller.
Speaker:Three pages, three questions. Go.
Speaker:If that was useful, follow SEO Fucking What wherever you are listening
Speaker:so you don't miss the next one.
Speaker:And grab the OnPage SEO toolkit, which is now completely free. If
Speaker:you want the whole thing properly,
Speaker:the Non-Wanky SEO course is my full SEO course.
Speaker:Both are at nonwankyseo.com.
Speaker:Shitloads of advice and help.
Speaker:It's all in plain English because I'm not gonna sit here shouting at
Speaker:people for hiding behind an acronym, and then go and do it myself.
Speaker:Until next time, get found.
Speaker:Make money.
Speaker:Stop paying anyone to audit four letters that don't have a score.
