Google's Gary Illyes cleared up one thing that SEOs have been possibly confused about for some time. There is not single score for EAT. There is not EAT score. EAT is not a real thing at Google. EAT is made up of many many algorithms, baby algorithms, that are made up of in the Google core algorithm.
Google does not give you a score for your site on how well the site does EAT. In fact, there are probably multiple algorithms for each letter in EAT. Expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Each alone probably have numerous algorithms that determine various signals to measure how authoritative a site might be based on who knows, PageRank, citations, the content accuracy (see what I did there) and more.
Here are the tweets covering when Gary Illyes said this on stage at PubCon:
“EAT and YMYL are concepts introduced for Quality Raters to dumb down algorithm concepts. They are not ‘scores’ used by Google internally.“ #Pubcon @methode Followup: There is no EAT algorithm.
— Grant Simmons (@simmonet) October 10, 2019
#GaryAMA
— Kristine Schachinger (@schachin) October 10, 2019
Q. Is there an EAT Score for your website?
YMYL or EAT are CONCEPTS there are NO SCORES applied to your site. #Pubcon @jenstar
Q:Does Google have an EAT score?
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) October 10, 2019
A: There's no internal EAT score or YMYL score. The QRG are guidelines for raters. EAT and YMYL are concepts that allow humans to "dumb down" algorithms. There is no one algo that looks for YMYL@methode @jenstar #Pubcon
"conceptualized as YMYL. It's not like we have a YMYL score though."@methode @jenstar #Pubcon
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) October 10, 2019
Does Google have an EAT score that it applies to pages? @methode: no. What we have is the guidelines for quality raters. Dumbing down algorithms. #Pubcon
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 10, 2019
The core algorithm is a collection of probably millions of small algorithms that look for signals in pages or links that could be conceptualized as EAT. There's no core component that specifically targets EAT. @methode #Pubcon
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 10, 2019
There is no EAT or YMYL score or classifier or algorithm at google. These are guidelines for what the algorithm wants to reward. It's a conceptual way to look at the result of multiple algorithms and signals. @methode (thanks for the shout out) #pubcon
— Ryan Jones (@RyanJones) October 10, 2019
"We don't have a YMYL algorithm, nor an EAT algorithm" - @methode #pubcon
— Simon Heseltine (@SimonHeseltine) October 10, 2019
But yes, you can do things to improve your EAT (not literally EAT) but you can do things to improve your site that signal to Google improvements in the concept of EAT:
.@jenstar
— Simon Heseltine (@SimonHeseltine) October 10, 2019
if people increase their E.A.T. on their site, will it increase their rankings?@methode
- It depends, but not necessarily#Pubcon
"Increasing your EAT is probably a good thing if you are in the YMYL space."@methode @jenstar #Pubcon
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) October 10, 2019
Also from Marie Haynes blog:
Is there an E-A-T score? Gary: “There’s no internal EAT score or YMYL score. The Quality Raters’ Guidelines are guidelines for raters. EAT and YMYL are concepts that allow humans to dumb down algorithms. There is no one algo that looks for YMYL. He said that Google has “a collection of millions of tiny algorithms that work in unison to spit out a ranking score. Many of those baby algorithms look for signals in pages or content. When you put them together in certain ways, they can be conceptualized as YMYL. It’s not like we have a YMYL score though.”He also said that “Multiple algorithms conceptualize E-A-T”
My take is that Google does want us, webmasters, to focus on EAT because it makes for an overall better web site. Improving your EAT on your site should signal to Google through other means that your YMYL site should rank better for specific terms. But a site is not assigned an EAT score, like it might be given a Panda score back in the day.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
