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:

https://seofuckingwhatpodcast.co.uk/episode/dont-be-conned-into-paying-for-an-ai-search-optimisation-audit-ffs

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

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.

This is SEO Fucking What. I'm Nikki, 30 years in SEO, which

means I was doing this before

it had a name, before it had acronyms, and long before anyone worked out

you could sell a course on it.

Today I want to talk about E-E-A-T and helpful content.

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.

By the end of this, you'll know what E-E-A-T actually is, who it's for, what

the helpful content thing really is now, and three things you can go and do

this week that will actually make a difference.

10 minutes.

Let's go.

So what exactly is E-E-A-T?

It's experience, expertise,

authoritativeness,

trustworthiness.

That's the four.

It used to be E-A-T, just three letters.

And Google added on the extra E in about December 2022. Experience.

We'll come back to that one because it's the most useful letter in the

whole lot for a small business.

But where does E-E-A-T come from?

It comes from a document called the Search Quality Rater Guidelines.

It's a real thing and it's free.

It's about 180 pages of PDF, and you can download it from Google's own developer

website. And Google gives that document to thousands of contractors around the world.

Those people are called quality raters.

Their job is to sit there day in, day out, being shown a search query

and a webpage and grading how good a result that page is for the query.

Sounds like a pretty interesting job. Before you start worrying, quality

raters can't touch your rankings.

Not one tiny bit.

A quality rater can't rank you.

Can't derank you, can't penalise you,

can't flag your site for a slap.

They're not sitting there with a big red pen and a grudge

against your web design business.

They're mystery shoppers, really.

They go round, they eat the dinner, they fill in the form,

they send it back to head office.

Head office reads a few thousand of those forms and decides

whether to change the recipe.

Nobody's taking your dinner away from you.

So when somebody tells you that E-E-A-T is a ranking factor, they're wrong.

There's no E-E-A-T score.

There's no number sitting in a database somewhere marking your website out

of 10 for authoritativeness. It doesn't exist.

What it actually is: a description of what good looks like.

Google wrote down what it wants its results to be like, handed that

description to the raters, and then its engineers use the resulting scores

to work out whether an algorithm change makes the results better or

worse, which means it does matter.

Google is actively trying to build a system that rewards the

stuff that raters mark highly.

It just doesn't matter in the way you've been sold it.

Now, trust is the one that counts.

Google's own guidelines say this, more or less

in these words: trust is the most important of the four.

The other three exist to support it.

So think about that for a second, because it changes the whole job.

You can be the most experienced person in your industry and

still not be trustworthy.

You can have loads of expertise, but no contact details, no

company number, no prices.

A stock photo of a woman in a headset who works for Shutterstock.

That's expertise with no trust, and it's worth very little.

And the whole thing scales with stakes.

There's another acronym here, sorry, but this one's worth knowing.

YMYL.

It means your money, your life, which covers medical advice, financial advice,

legal advice, anything to do with safety.

Google applies a much higher bar to those pages, and rightly so.

A page about which chemotherapy to have should be held to a stricter standard

than a page about scented candles.

If you're a small B2B services business, you're somewhere in the middle.

You are not YMYL.

So relax slightly, but you are asking people to hand over money

on the strength of a website.

So no, you don't get to ignore it.

Now let's look at the helpful content thing.

In August 2022, Google launched something it called the helpful content update.

It was aimed squarely at sites churning out content for search

engines rather than for humans.

It did another one in September 2023, and then in March 2024, in the

core update, Google folded the whole helpful content system into the core

algorithm. Which means if anyone offers to recover you from a helpful content

update, that separate thing they're talking about doesn't exist anymore.

It's not a switch that got flipped, it got absorbed.

It's just Google.

Now it's part of the machine, but something really useful did come outta

it, and it's free and it's sitting on Google's site being ignored by

everybody who'd rather sell you an audit.

It's the documentation page on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content.

And the best bit of it is three questions.

Who, how and why?

So who created this content?

Can a reader tell?

Is there a name on it?

Is there any indication a human being with a job and an opinion was involved?

How was it made?

If AI was involved,

is that obvious or is it hidden?

If you tested something, how did you test it?

If you reviewed a product, did you actually touch the product?

And why?

Why does this exist?

And this is the one that catches everybody out.

Was this page made to help someone, or was it made to rank on Google?

If the honest answer is to rank, you've already got your problem.

That's the whole helpful content thing in one question.

Content written primarily for search engines is the thing being targeted. Not

badly written content or short content.

Content that's written for the wrong audience.

Now, let's look at the grift. E-E-A-T audits. £2,000 for a spreadsheet that tells

you to add author boxes, author schema.

Somebody will tell you that adding person markup to your pages creates E-E-A-T.

It doesn't. Google's own people have said this so many

times they must be sick of it.

Structured data is fine.

I'm not telling you to rip it out.

It just isn't a magic spell

that conjures expertise from nowhere.

A headshot and a byline is not expertise.

It's a headshot and a byline, mate.

And the reason this particular grift works so well is that

E-E-A-T is just four abstract nouns.

You can't measure it. If you can't measure it,

nobody can ever prove that the agency didn't deliver it.

I did a whole episode on the AI search audit version of

this racket back in episode 15.

If you wanna hear me get really ranty about an invoice, listen to that one.

It's the same trick, just different letters.

So if there's no score, no audit, and no magic markup, what can you

actually do about any of this?

Three things.

All of them doable this week.

None of them costing you two grand. Right after this.

Three takeaways.

All you're gonna need.

One, put a human name on it.

That's the who question answered. A real name on your content.

A real bio, real credentials, and a link to somewhere that person actually exists.

LinkedIn.

A professional body, a company page.

Not the team, not admin, not nothing.

If you wrote it, sign it.

You've been doing this for however many years.

Say so.

Number two, add the bit that only you could have written.

That's the extra E. Experience. And it's the single biggest advantage

you have over every AI-generated competitor page in your industry.

So fucking use it.

Get specific. What did you try?

What happened?

What did it cost?

How long did it take?

What went wrong?

What would you do differently?

Name the client if they'll let you. Put the actual number in.

An AI can write a competent page about your industry.

It cannot invent what happened on Friday afternoon in your office with

your clients and how you dealt with it.

That's yours.

Nobody can copy it.

And three, make yourself easy to verify.

This is trust, and trust is the one that counts most,

remember. Have an address, have your phone number.

Have a company number, a real about page with a real face on it.

Prices if you can.

An honest returns or terms page.

Anything that lets a stranger check you're a genuine business run

by actual people who can be found.

It's the least glamorous work in SEO, but it's the bit that really matters.

So here's your homework.

Pick your three most important pages, not your blog, your money pages,

the ones that bring in enquiries.

Read each one and ask Google's three questions out loud.

Who made this?

How was it made?

Why does it exist?

Be honest, because you already know the answer.

Then take the worst one and do all three of today's takeaways to it.

Make sure your name's on it.

Make sure that it has experience in it.

Make sure the verification stuff is sorted around it.

If you want the fuller version of that process,

episode 18 walks through auditing your whole site page by page.

Today's job is smaller.

Three pages, three questions. Go.

If that was useful, follow SEO Fucking What wherever you are listening

so you don't miss the next one.

And grab the OnPage SEO toolkit, which is now completely free. If

you want the whole thing properly,

the Non-Wanky SEO course is my full SEO course.

Both are at nonwankyseo.com.

Shitloads of advice and help.

It's all in plain English because I'm not gonna sit here shouting at

people for hiding behind an acronym, and then go and do it myself.

Until next time, get found.

Make money.

Stop paying anyone to audit four letters that don't have a score.