Google’s algorithm undergoes enormous shifts to prioritise content focused on expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness

Lily Ray
Additional contact information
Lily Ray: Director of SEO, Path Interactive, USA

Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, 2019, vol. 7, issue 2, 128-136

Abstract: While Google updates its algorithm hundreds of times per year, the 1st August, 2018 update, and subsequent related updates, were significant both in their scale as well as which websites they affected. These algorithm updates particularly affected websites providing content in the category Google calls ‘Your Money Your Life’ (YMYL) — medical, legal, financial, e-commerce and other websites that can significantly impact the happiness and health of its users. The algorithm updates rolled out shortly after Google updated its Search Quality Guidelines, a document Google uses to train human quality reviewers who help benchmark the quality of Google’s results and whose feedback informs updates to Google’s algorithms. In this updated document, Google emphasised the importance of expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T) of the content creators and brands behind YMYL websites. Google’s new criteria established the need for these websites to emphasise who their authors are and why they should be trusted to write about those topics. This paper looks at historical SEO performance to analyse the role E-A-T may have played in organic traffic patterns after the late 2018 and early 2019 Google algorithm updates.

Keywords: Google; algorithms; Google algorithm; expertise; authoritativeness; trustworthiness; content; content quality; E-A-T; EAT (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hstalks.com/article/5136/download/ (application/pdf)
https://hstalks.com/article/5136/ (text/html)
Requires a paid subscription for full access.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aza:jdsmm0:y:2019:v:7:i:2:p:128-136

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing from Henry Stewart Publications
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Henry Stewart Talks ().