{"id":64,"date":"2018-09-07T16:32:52","date_gmt":"2018-09-07T16:32:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.searchenginewatch.com\/2018\/09\/07\/what-googles-e-a-t-score-means-for-ecommerce\/"},"modified":"2020-01-23T18:29:26","modified_gmt":"2020-01-23T18:29:26","slug":"what-googles-e-a-t-score-means-for-ecommerce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/2018\/09\/07\/what-googles-e-a-t-score-means-for-ecommerce\/","title":{"rendered":"What Google\u2019s E-A-T score means for ecommerce"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google<\/a> updated their search quality rating guidelines in July. These rating guidelines, which you can view here<\/a>, are used by humans to rate the quality of web pages as search results for specific queries. These ratings are used to guide how Google\u2019s<\/a> search engineers improve their search engine.<\/p>\n

Soon after the update to the guidelines, Google<\/a> introduced a broad core algorithm update circa August 1st, most likely to ensure that the search engine was returning results that reflected the changes to its guidelines.<\/p>\n

One of the most important changes to the guidelines was a greater focus on Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T), as well as a focus on applying this to individual authors\u2014not just brands or web pages.<\/p>\n

E-A-T is important for the ecommerce<\/a> industry because shopping pages are considered by the rater guidelines to be \u201cYour Money or Your Life\u201d (YMYL) pages, and these types of pages are held to the highest quality standards. For that reason they are also expected to have the highest E-A-T.<\/p>\n

If you want your shopping pages to show up in the search results, you will need to identify how to maximize your E-A-T score for Google\u2019s<\/a> hypothetical human quality raters, which Google\u2019s<\/a> algorithms are designed to emulate.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s talk about how to do that.<\/p>\n

Which content is Google<\/a> taking into consideration?<\/h3>\n

The expertise, authority, and trustworthiness of a page are determined primarily by looking at the main content on the page. What counts as main content is obvious when we are talking about a content site like a blog, but which content are Google\u2019s quality raters taking into consideration on your category and product pages?<\/p>\n

The first important thing to recognize is that \u201ccontent\u201d is not limited to text. The rater guidelines explicitly state that \u201cwebpage content includes … functionality (such as online shopping features, email<\/a>, calculator functionality, online games, etc.).\u201d<\/p>\n

So raters aren\u2019t just being asked to evaluate text. They\u2019re being asked to evaluate your site\u2019s functionality. It isn\u2019t just the text on your page that needs to be high E-A-T, it\u2019s the design, interface, interactivity, useability, and other features.<\/p>\n

For example, raters are explicitly asked to \u201cput at least one product in the cart to make sure the shopping cart is functioning.\u201d They are reminded that \u201chigh quality shopping content should allow users to find the products they want and to purchase the products easily.\u201d I highly recommend meeting these basic functions expected of the modern ecommerce<\/a> site in service of that goal:<\/p>\n