Here comes E-E-A-T: Google adds Experience to its quality criteria

Goodbye E-A-T, the acronym we have been accustomed to using for years now in reference to the way Google and its quality raters evaluate whether pages provide useful and relevant information: on December 15, Google in fact released a new update to the official guidelines for its quality raters with which it introduces another letter-or rather another criterion, the E for Experience. From now on, therefore, we must learn to think E-E-A-T, an acronym that encompasses experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthyness of the site and content authors.

Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines, the December 15, 2022 update

Just four and a half months after July 2022, Google has thus updated its guidelines for search quality raters for the second time this year, making some substantial changes to EAT, as we shall see.

As an ever-useful premise, let’s remember (as, moreover, Big G’s announcements also do) that the guidelines are the handbook used by quality raters as a compass to evaluate the performance of Google’s various Search ranking systems and do not directly affect ranking, but they are also useful for those who curate/manage a site to understand how to self-assess their content for success in Google Search.

Overall, the revised document is now about nine pages longer, re