E-A-T for a brand rather than a person

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E-A-T for a brand rather than a person

AdamJones

7:26 pm on Sep 25, 2019 (gmt 0)

Hi everyone,

This is my first post so sincere apologies if I make any mistakes.

I believe my website suffered after a couple of core updates in 2018, particularly the Medic update in August 2018. I've been reading a lot about E-A-T and I certainly think my website could make the expertise, authority and trustworthiness behind its articles clearer. For example, at the time of the update, I didn't have any author boxes at all, or a good About page.

However, while I do want to show authority and trustworthiness, I don't particularly like the idea of having named authors. I'd rather build up the E-A-T of the brand.

Is there any downside to not naming a human author and instead having the author of every post being the same brand name (which matched the URL)? Is it as easy/possible to "score" well for E-A-T if you are a brand only, without declaring the person/people behind the scenes?

Thank you

tangor

7:44 pm on Sep 25, 2019 (gmt 0)

Short answer, yes.

Longer: it is the content that matters more than anything else.

That said, is there a reason to be adverse to having articles linked to their authors?

tangor

7:44 pm on Sep 25, 2019 (gmt 0)

Meant to add:

Welcome to Webmasterworld!

lucy24

8:17 pm on Sep 25, 2019 (gmt 0)

Who are the human authors? People you pay to put your expertise into words--or people who have expertise in their own right?

AdamJones

9:53 pm on Sep 25, 2019 (gmt 0)

Thank you for the welcome and the speedy replies.

The authors are people who have expertise in their own right (inc. myself). The main reason I'm not keen on linking to named authors is privacy, to be honest. While I have nothing to "hide", I just don't particularly like the idea of having a name, bio, photo, etc, all in the public domain on what is a very popular website.

tangor

10:43 pm on Sep 25, 2019 (gmt 0)

Balance authority with privacy and go from there.

Not much else to add.

martinibuster

10:03 pm on Sep 26, 2019 (gmt 0)

Yes, E-A-T is important.
No, it's not the main reason why sites lost rankings in Medic and subsequent updates.

You need to focus on relevance, that's what search algorithms are about.
1. To understand what a user means when they type a search query.
2. Identify the web pages that satisfy those search queries.

There is NO algorithm research paper or patent that describes improvements to search results by ONLY ranking sites that have author bylines.

It's a ludicrous and laughable idea that Google can improve YMYL search results by showing preference to with author boxes/bylines.

There is ZERO evidence of any patent or research paper to support the idea that Google will de-rank a site because it lacks an author byline, so the idea is clearly misinformed.

If you're in a YMYL scenario, check out what Google is ranking. I've seen plenty of sites ranking without that kind of author information.

It's kind of a good idea to flaunt your author credibility if you have those to flaunt. There are many ways to do that.

Above all, focus on Relevance.

Good luck!
;)

Roger Montti