What does a Google E-A-T?

How editors can feed the beast

Who is your most important reader? Business editors imagine it's a company's chief executive, or the people desperately trying to understand what the CEO is doing. Investors, business partners and especially potential business partners hang on the CEO's every word. Crain's Chicago Business used to advertise itself as "Where the Who's Who read what's what," till Who's Who, the place you looked up famous people, started being replaced by Google. Who's Who? Say what?

Editors should think about another very influential reader: Google. Its audience is nearly everyone in business. Like the CEO, Google has tremendous resources. And like the CEO, it does not have much time for us. As a result there's a thriving marekting specialty, search engine optimization, or SEO. Its practitioners—let's call them SEOs too—all want Google to share a bit of that audience.

Their problem is not a mystery. SEOs all want a listing at the top of search engine results, and there's not much room at the top. Whatever the SEO tells you, the search engine is not hocus-pocus either. It's a powerful computer, but it's most comfortable reading code. English is its second language. As a reader, Google has artificial intelligence at its disposal, but it's still not very intuitive. Even so, its decisions can make or break a business.

Let's look at a web page from Google's point of view. What's the most important part of this message? We know from context: It's what the big type says. But Google's no good at context.

Next, here is the same message in HTML. Sure, that's a large font size at the top, and the text seems to give it away. But Google follows the hierarchy of code, in which h6 is the lowest of six levels of heading, and h1 the highest. In the code's context, font size is trivial. The second line is more important; the first is just a kicker.

So, how does a search engine operate out of its element in the foreign world of text? Google won't show its algorithm, it's own computer code. But Google does at least some resarch. It hires human search quality testers to see if the algorithm works, and has to tell the testers what to look for. From those instructions, we know Google expects three things in a reliable source: Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. Web pages are what they E-A-T. (Google adopts hyphens to avoid confusing the word with the acronym, or what I call the Johnny Seo Effect.

Expertise, authority and trustworthiness are closely related skills. It's hard to parse out the difference: Experts are authorities you trust. But Google really is looking for three separate things.

Expertise

First, reliable sources know what they're talking about. Google sets the bar higher for expertise higher as the stakes rise. Rating documents describe this as Your Money or Your Life. They do not mean the stick-up man's setup in a Jack Benny joke ("I'm thinking it over!"), just that money and life decisions are the categories that readers research intently. For Google, civics and current events are money and life choices, which is good for news editors.

How does Google find experts? Mostly, it logs names and follows links. An author bio page separates an expert from just another byline. It can be a simple tag collection or a purpose-built page with story links. Google also reads message boards. As an editor, I found a message board of lawyers painful to moderate. Google saw it as a show of everyday expertise. It may have been a food fight. Still, everyone in the cafeteria had advanced degrees.

Editors, take note: Contributed content is good! There's no shame in accepting unpaid submissions. Google finds their credentials all over the web. Plain old reporters can't compete, unless they have author pages to show their own expertise.

Authority

Not only do authors need to show their expertise, publications also have to build their reputation. Mainstream media have a leg up because their links are shared so widely. Academic publications also rate well, because they're cited as primary sources. In life sciences, Google is looking for coronavirus facts, and it reads the footnotes.

The reporter or blogger should emulate primary sources: The more links to their content, the better. SEO experts claim that recency beats primacy, and it's true that for faddish topics it's good to link to the latest news. For this reason SEOs have convinced many notso newsy publications to drop timestamps entirely, which seems pointless. Google still logs the day it first found the page.

SEOs also rank web pages for "domain authority." This is no more than a simple count of links from authoritative sites. (What makes them authoritative? Links from authoritative sites, of course.) Google of course counts not only the links but how many times they're clicked. If search users are following the links, they'll mean something to Google.

Thought leaders, take note: Publicists are good! Getting quoted in news media gets noticed not only by thousands of readers but by Google too. Social media mentions are another sign of search engine authority. Google bathes in the Twitter firehose, and it does treat RTs as endorsements.

Trust

Finally, Google looks for third-party validation. Journalists are taught not to trust Wikipedia, because practically anyone can make themselves a Wikipedia contributor. However, Google explicitly tells search quality raters to look for and read the Wikipedia entry of a site they're evaluating; if Wikipedia mentions Pulitzer prizes, raters can infer that the publication has a positive reputation.

Transparency also engenders trust. When I created an automotive buying guide, I not only provided a rating for the vehicles but also specifics on how the cars were scored. Google favors sites that show their work.

Merchants, take note: Customer service is good! Google expects to find contact information like physical address, email links, terms of service and privacy pages. And it's realistic: Google's raters are warned not to make too much of ratings. "Almost every website will have complaints about customer service," the raters' guide says. Technical resources such as secure https pages also suggest a reliable operator.

How do I optimize text for Google?

As a newspaper writer, I was allergic to jargon and tried not to use it. As a B2B editor I came to embrace industry terms of art and their very specific meanings. Google keeps track those terms in search queries. A search prompt reveals what Google expects users to type next, based on experience.

When I created tagging taxonomy at the Chicago Tribune and American Bar Association, I had a head start. Librarians have been indexing digital content using keywords since the 1980s, along with contextural data like section and page number. These days we have Google Trends to help editors organize their stories. Google Ads customers have access to more data on search terms, including the cost of placing an ad in specific search results. Price is a proxy for competition.

Google Trends indicates the phrases used in search and does its own indexing by topic. Editors who don't have a librarian on call can simply see how Google indexes its topics, and get the benefit of its machine learning into the different ways people land on the same results. Google Trends reveals how readers use buzzwords like optimize in their searches, and more importantly, how many searches consist of optimize definition.

Google has something to teach headline writers too. The SEO secretariat has long held that content should use popular keywords and use them often. Google AI makes that less important; it deduces that health equity and health disparities are getting at the same point. Yet it's better for a headline to use the same language as a Google search, and to repeat keywords in URL "slugs" and article text.

Editors, take note: Once you define your jargon, Google might like your definition and feature it in the first page of search results.

Google doesn't evaluate much of anything but tracks everything. It's a database of every search ever made. So while SEOs do their optimizing, Google is optimizing to please the biggest auience possible. That's what makes Google an editor's most important reader.