The origins of E-A-T: Page content, hyperlink analysis and usage data - Search Engine Land

Predicting the future based on knowledge of the past is fundamental. I always keep a keen eye on technological advances but never lose track of the past.

Past achievements and breakthroughs in the information retrieval (IR) field conjure the possibilities of “where to next” in search technology.

That then leads me to what impact it will have on search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and methodologies in the future.

In the previous installment of my SEO “Back to the Future” series, Indexing and keyword ranking techniques revisited: 20 years later, I concluded by showing a graphic that explains something known as the “abundance problem.” This frequently prevents pure keyword ranking techniques (on-page) from placing the more authoritative pages at the top of the results. Relevant – yes. But authoritative?

For Google quality raters, E-A-T may only have been around for a few years. But in the IR field, it has always been at the core of how and what search engines do.

In this article, I’ll explore how far back expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T) goes and what they’re actually based on.

‘E-A-T’ 20 years ago

There’s still quite a lot of ambiguity in the industry about what “authoritativeness” actually means in the SEO sense. How does a site/page become authoritative?

Perhaps looking at how “authority” – as well as the terms “expert” and “trust” – came into the IR and SEO lexicon can give you more insight.

Here’s a graphic I created back in 2002, but this...



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