Ep 208: What You Heard About EAT Is All Wrong Kyle Roof Explains The Truth

Jaryd Krause:

Do you want to know how to actually build EEAT authority, real authority, on your own website? Hi, I am Jaryd Krause, host of the Buying Online Businesses Podcast, and today I am speaking with another guest, Kyle Roof, who has been on before and who is responsible for the development and implementation of all SEO techniques used by SEO ad agency Hi Voltage SEO and SEO tool Optimizer Pro. There will be a link to that as well.

Kyle is also the co-founder of Internet Marketing Gold, a global community of 3000+ SEO professionals who test and approve cutting edge SEO techniques. Kyle’s SEO discoveries and techniques are followed by many SEO professionals, businesses, and leaders in the space. He has been featured in many respected publications and is a regular speaker on SEO and SEO testing ad conferences throughout the world. He has been on the podcast multiple times, and in this podcast episode, Kyle and I talk about EEAT and what EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust, what that looks like; and how it can be visualized.

But then, where do people get EAT incorrectly, and why do they think that having a big authority outside of SI is very important? Then we move into talking about what they need to do to actually build real EAT within their site. And what are the things these con artists need to pull off with different types of schemes, offers, and pieces of content, as well as internal linking? So there is so much within this podcast episode, if you are wanting to not get rattled by Google with the EEAT updates, make sure you tune in to this podcast episode; it’s going to be super-duper valuable.

Jaryd Krause:

Kyle, welcome back.

Kyle Roof:

Hey, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, I am looking forward to it. We had a little chat off air, and everybody who doesn’t know Kyle yet should check out podcast episode 110 that Kyle and I have done. We talked a bit more about Kyle’s back story and what Kyle does in our last episode, and in this one we are just going to go straight into some solid SEO things, debunk a few things, and chat about a lot of things out there that people may not have clarity on. Kyle, you emailed me about that and said, Hey, I am looking to chat about this sort of stuff, and I think it needs to be talked about with everybody listening.

I think it’s about 99.99% of the people who email me to come on the podcast that get declined, like we have a team and the team shuts them down before they get onto my end, so when you reached out, I was like, Yeah, let’s chat about this. It’s a good subject to provide clarity on. So, EAT right? Expertise, Authority, and Trust and then there is EEAT—tell us what that is for.

Kyle Roof:

They added just an extra E for fun.

Jaryd Krause:

Yes let’s just chuck an extra E on and lets just make it a little bit more confusing.

Kyle Roof:

It’s kind of making me feel like Google will always rebrand every 18 months. You know whatever they have going on, they will just run through a rebrand for no apparent reason. The extra E they added on is called experience, which is pretty poorly defined when you read through what they are talking about; it’s kind of like saying a person with experience has experience. It’s like, okay; thank you for that. But something they emphasize is that, of the EEAT factors, trust is kind of the base; it’s in the middle, and E, authority, and your other E kind of form around that, but trust is kind of that center point that they are looking at.

Jaryd Krause:

So what you are saying is that you have EAT, which came out first; expertise, authority, trust, and that’s basically the core of trust, and then on the outside, when you have trust, you have that added E, which may be an outer layer, which is experience, on site experiences.

Kyle Roof:

Well actually trust is kind of like circled in the middle and then the other three kind of form like circles kind of outside of that, latching onto it but trust is at the core center.

Jaryd Krause:

Right, and then you have experience. So, the two of these are experience, authority, and trust, so break down that "E," so you have got "E" experience and expertise. And with experience, we are talking about experience. Is experience proveable in the niche or in the space?

Kyle Roof:

See, that’s one of the things that I often think about—how far outside of your site do you think Google is going to go, when it is looking at your site to rank it and actually may be taking a step back? The real purpose of E is to determine whether Google should even put your site in the index in the first place.

Should this even be here, and I really think it probably has something to do with when you reach a certain traffic amount and you are getting a certain number of visitors and a certain amount of exposure, and Google will do an EAT sort of evaluation on you, should you even be here? Should we even be putting you here in the first place, and that’s kind of the whole point of it. Then you have think about so if google is going to come and crawl your site for this thing, how far outside your site will google actually go to gain information. I have a real hard time believing that Google is going to be like, Let's click on their Linkedin and look at this resume, or hey, maybe they wrote a book; let’s look at that, and oh, that looks really good.

There is no chance that Google is going to have the time to do that with each site, so I still believe it’s everything on your site. It’s everything on your site that a bot can find, and a bot can crawl through your site; that’s where these signals will have to live, and that’s where you will have to put your best foot forward. I think it’s really important to say that it’s not just one thing. Most people are like, "Oh, I got hit and I had that one thing," and you may have been missing enough of the other thing. It’s checking enough boxes within each of these categories to kind of pass through these evaluations.

And also, don’t think, and it’s also a very important point, that none of this will actually help you rank, and having a lot of these things on your site isn’t going to help you rank, but the idea is that it will help you keep your rank once you get that evaluation.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, there are so many things to break down there. You feel that once a site gets to a certain level of traffic, Google starts to hang on. You are getting a decent amount of traffic. Let’s test to see if you deserve that traffic based on your trust levels and your experience. Do you have an ideology around it, like it could be 50,000 page views a month or 100,000 page views a month, and is that why you also see so many sites that can get away with it? I have seen so many smaller sites that depend on what you call cheap, but I would say that the cheaper sites don’t have any EAT and are getting away with it to a certain extent as I guess they haven’t reached that threshold of traffic.

Kyle Roof:

I think that is true. I don’t know what the particular number is, but it’s one of the things that, as you start to grow, you are sitting on a ticking time bomb by not addressing these issues, and the things that we are going to run through today are not earth shattering. It’s going to take half a day to knock everything out, and if your site isn’t worth half a day, then I am not sure what you are doing. That is kind of the bottom line, and you know it’s not obviously the easiest thing of all times, but still, it’s not the worst.

And it’s interesting, so a guy named James Dooley who runs a fantrank.com has a running theory, you should look at his site, and he has a whole article on EAT and actually EEAT now, where sites that have been hit and it appears that they have been hit by an EAT evaluation all seem to have the same referrals, so you can actually identify when Google might have actually come to your site through a specific referral and then whether you have actually had the evaluation or not. I can’t remember the top when he has identified it but go to his site fantrank.com and you can search for EAT with that or just do a google search on domain. But he lists the main one, and I think there may be 5 or 6 other potential referrals that they could be when Google is doing the evaluation, so I would definitely check out the article because he has spent more time on that specific aspect than I have.

Jaryd Krause:

Cool. Check that out, guys, we will link to it in the show notes as well. When the site starts to hit the traffic threshold, or this is a hypothesis as well, guys, where we are estimating how Google works because we don’t know for sure, in fact, but based on data and speaking to other SEOs, this is a likelihood, but that likelihood of say a site meeting a certain traffic threshold and before a referral link would come and check our site, Google is not going to spend time going through a Linkdin profile and then work out how long have you worked for this company and then see if that is actually proven to be true or not. What are some of the things that are important to have on the site that you feel Google actually spends some of its cruel budget on?

Kyle Roof:

Yeah, when you look at the first one, "trust, which is likely, Google says the most important thing they are looking at is who is responsible for this content. If somebody follows this advice and they get harmed, who can they contact? Or if they follow this advice and have some issues, who do they contact? Who is ultimately responsible for this? And it should be a real business now that there is a company behind this website. I have had some people argue with me that you know we are not a real company. Well, are you making money with this website then you should be.

Jaryd Krause:

Well, you said the exact same thing the last time I remember, and it's important.

Kyle Roof:

It’s still very, very important. So is there a real company behind it? Do you have a local address on the site that is your business address? Do you have a local phone number? Do you have multiple email addresses on the site? So, it’s not just a blank contact form that everybody knows goes nowhere but actually different multiple ways to contact different offices or different departments within your company. Do you have an "about the company page that talks about the company and has the organization chart on it? Do you have an about the team page that has the people behind the company on it? And again, it’s not about having one of these things, it’s the idea of ticking enough of these boxes to show you are a real company and there is an entity that is responsible for the words that are on this website.

Jaryd Krause:

And that you have authors that run the author page and the link to the team page, and on the team page, you have different persons for different departments with their own different email addresses, and the company can have one address with one phone number, right?

Kyle Roof:

Yes, that’s exactly right, and again, a lot of people say that I don’t want to put an address down as I work from home; well, real companies have figured that out, and they have figured out how to do that for quite some time, so I will take a moment to figure that out, it’s not over yet. It’s kind of staying within that trust zone, you know, when you go, is it a real company there? and then he is like, "Is it a real website?" and a real website will have things like a current copyright, privacy policy, terms & conditions, refunds, complaints, cookie notices, GDPR, ADA compliances if you are in the areas where you need that, mobile friendliness, limited 404s and no 500s, errors, SSL, and all the kind of basic stuff that you should have anyway—basic stuff like a real company will have anyway—like a privacy, Those would all be indicators on the trust side of this being also a website, so you kind of have a real business, real website, and those would be the things that I would hone in on that a bot can easily look for to determine if they are actually there, if these signals exist on your site.

Jaryd Krause:

How do you feel about saying that somebody has all that and has gone through the effort and made sure that they have their team page with their team on it and that for each author the address, the phone number, as well as terms and conditions pages and what not, How do you feel Google is measuring the experience of these authors in their particular niche?

Kyle Roof:

I don’t think they are. So it kind of may be a better way to look at it if we look at the expertise part of that; is that person an expert within the field? A lot of people get confused here and think that may mean I need a Ph.D. or I need a doctor, a medical doctor, to write my content, and I think it is important to mention here that Google is not in the value judgment game. They are not going to sit down and say what’s better here; a degree from Stanford or a degree from MIT who knows and nor does google care and its not going to go like that this person has ten years of experience in a degree from small or large college, that is not anything that I think they are going to do.

So, I mean, that’s what we talked about earlier, that how far outside your site Google is actually going to want to go to really look at that and spend time on that, and I don’t think they are going to want to. What you need to establish is that it’s a real person; that’s the signal that you need to put out there. So on those author pages you want a person schema and in that person schema you can do same as and same as can be link out to a Wikipedia page of that person if that’s famous or a Linkdin url or may be within the industry if there are pages where they are listed you know that they are at this university or within this organization, you can list all those same as and you will be really doing is showing that this is an actual person and I think that’s the most important signal, it is not that this person is an established expert, I don’t think you can really do that or will want to do but it’s just showing that this is an actual human and that’s the most important thing that establishing it is actually someone.

Jaryd Krause:

So what about these sites, and I have seen so many of them where people have authors on the page and a lot of content is clearly written by non-first English speakers, and then they have a Linkdin profile that they are linking to, and that profile doesn’t likely have more than two connections on Linkdin and nothing else on their profile? How important is that? Do you feel Google just wants to see a handful of external links or one external link to something that looks relatively close to the person?

Kyle Roof:

I think I want to say that this is something that’s up to you—how much you want to do this to prove that somebody is real. I don’t think Google is going to punish somebody for being a non-native English speaker because there are, you know, a lot of non-native English speakers who are expert researchers, and their written English is not going to be as good as perhaps someone else's, but that doesn’t make them any less of an expert. They could be more of an expert, they just don’t write English very well.

So I don’t think that Google is going to punish somebody for that, and I really do think that it’s just trying to establish as well as it can that this is a human being. That’s what you want to do, and so the more of you, the better the chances are, and I don’t know if it’s the minimum; you probably just need to have one URL, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily that number, and the tipping point is three, you know, but it’s about as much as you can do to show that it’s a human, which is the idea.

Jaryd Krause:

So if person schema organized it like company schema, would you feel that having a Wikipedia page for the person because Google can crawl that is going to be better than Linkdin?

Kyle Roof:

Absolutely. If and if you cannot get Wikipedia, may be because they are not famous enough, you can get wikidata, which is also something that Google would crawl, and with wikidata you can identify that someone is a person, and a very important point here would be that once you have established that someone is a person from their author bio page when they actually write something for you like an article and within that you have got author schema and author schema references that author’s bio page that you have put together. So you are actually referencing the work that you did to establish that they are humans, so if an article was written by this person, check out this link to go over here to see that they are an actual person.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, and that’s on their author page and author schema, linked by links. Would those be the same forward links that would say that the person is featured in a PR way on the site as well because Google has budget to crawl that versus getting off to go into Linkdin?

Kyle Roof:

See, I am not really sure how much Google is going to go and crawl and look. I think it’s more about the existence of the link, to be honest, and there may be a few others, like Google, and I think Wikipedia and Wikidata might be two. But I really don’t know if you can count on the fact that Google is going to go and investigate your people. I don’t think that’s the case at all, but it’s the signals that you put out that are saying that this person has done these things and they have all these things, and you can go and check it out, I think that is the key.

Jaryd Krause:

What I like is that Google is making sites and site owners take some level of responsibility for what they are putting out there, which is going to, I believe, help when people have a sense of responsibility they are going to do better work, which I believe is going to allow us better sights on the internet to be better. So a lot of people may be wanting to hide behind the screen and all of that sort of anonymous stuff, but it’s going to make the landscape for us a whole lot better too.

Kyle Roof:

That’s exactly right next to Google’s point, and that is why Google faked spam by asking, "Is this adding anything to the conversation? Is it actually benefiting anyone in any way? Is this good in the sense that there is information out there that they can benefit from? On top of that, is somebody responsible, you know, is somebody actually behind this? It’s all part of the mission, and it makes sense why they would want to put up a website. Why would they want this article to rank for a particular term in the first place if you can establish who wrote it and if nobody ends up taking responsibility for it?

Jaryd Krause:

How do you think Google will evolve in measuring the authority and trustworthiness of sites in the years to come? Like this, we are recording in 2023, or in 5 years, 2027. How do you think this might evolve? Obviously, this is speculation, but a lot of it can happen, and a lot of it can be true. How do you feel we should be preparing the site owners? So, that we can be on the benefit side of an algorithm change.

Kyle Roof:

Well, actually, that’s a great point, and I think that actually kind of gets into the authority side of the section because a lot of people mistake this one thinking authority means okay, this is where I need a PhD to run a site. That’s not what authority means at all, authority is actually having topical authority, meaning you have answered all the questions, and that is the best way to Google proof yourself and your site is to answer all the questions that somebody might have about a particular niche, concept, keyword, or category, because the idea is that if somebody can go and get the answer, there is something that Google will want to put in the index.

Additionally those kind of things will often help build up your whole site as you rank for those longer tale terms answering those questions your site gets stronger, you rank for more key words, you start getting more traffic, you are less susceptible to updates so that’s one of the things looking forward what you can do, that’s actually the biggest things you can do. All these other things are kind of like ticking the boxes and doing what you should be doing in the first place for a website, but the authority is that now you are doing the key word research, the research on a particular topic, and making sure you are covering the breadth of that topic.

Jaryd Krause:

And answering it in a good way so that it ranks well, which can allow you to have your site be more stable and benefit when an update is to come about, right?

Kyle Roof:

That’s exactly right. That is 100% correct, and I am kind of looking forward to the future. You know, this is what we saw in 2021 and ’22; the sites have already started to do this and have started to prepare really well, and this is something that I do a lot of on the agency side with my clients, the key word research that we do. We want to answer these questions and get this information so our site starts to rank for a lot more key words.

Now, these really aren't the exact huge money phrase that will take a long time to win, in terms that we can win this moment, but the things that people are asking or the information that people need about the concepts, and I can tell you that what has been gangbusters for us is doing a research strategy and content strategy around these terms and questions and getting them on the site as quickly as possible.

Jaryd Krause:

And the best way to find that is because sometimes people might be in a space and they have the idea that there is this question and I am going to try and answer it, but it may not be the same topical question that everybody is asking, and that’s where Google can be a good teacher in the sense that using even though it’s five little suggestions of different questions that are asked at the bottom of the search results.

Kyle Roof:

No, you are exactly right; let Google be the guide. You know, I have always said that the secret is hiding in plain sight. Google shows you what it likes, but then it also shows you what is semantically related and what is connected to your topic; that’s in the related key words, that’s in the other things that might make you win the slurps; when there is a carousel that shows all the different types of images, you might want to look at that and consider getting those kinds of things on your page so you can rank for those kinds of things, and in doing so, that’s going to demonstrate authority.

That’s going to show you have provided all the answers so that somebody comes to your site and can get the information they might need, and that's not only going to help you within these EAT evaluations, but that’s also going to help you rank. That’s going to help you move forward as your site gets stronger and make you less susceptible to any kind of new update.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, I love it, so authority is not in the sense that I am an authority in the space because I have a PhD or a degree or whatever it is; it’s covering topics that are important and relevant information and helping people and serving people with answers in your niche, which gives you the authority because you are covering those topics. And does that compound and lead to trust because you have covered so many topics in great breadth and answered them in a way that people are like, "Wow, that resonates with me and makes sense, and this is a great answer?" Is that where the T comes in and buys you trust because you are covering topical authority?

Kyle Roof:

Yeah, it has to. For sure, it has to. You know, it goes back to fundamentally when those pages started ranking for more and more terms and started getting more and more traffic that boosts the links, the internal links you have on those pages, so that’s where it comes in and how it kind of dovetails into the ranking algorithm part of it. It is just in that you know that the links are a way to think of link equity as a way to think of trust. Is this a trust worthy link, and the more you do this, the more these pages are gaining their own terms and gaining more traffic, the more trust they are essentially going to gain?

Jaryd Krause:

Understanding the EEAT now, and the trust comes from topical authority, and it’s a flow and effect of those outer shells that we have covered, so we got all the way down to trust, and then you mentioned links and how links can help with the trust, can you give us a bit of an explanation of what you mean by that?

Kyle Roof:

Sure, so what I am going to do is say that I have my target page about a particular keyword that I am going after, and then we discussed that people also ask us questions that are kind of around that topic. I am going to look for 3-5 of those just as a manageable number, and these are questions that didn’t quite fit on the page. Sometimes those questions are excellent to have on the page because they answer a very specific question, and that’s extremely on point, and that’s good content to have on that particular page, but sometimes they are just outside of it, and I am going to look for those and create those pages so that I can try to rank for them quickly, and I am going to link them all together and link them up to my target page.

Now, url structure doesn’t matter here because these are all links within the body; these are links on the page on those kinds of supporting pages that I have created, and I am going to link them up to my target page so as they gain those key words and get that traffic, they are then going to pass more juice up to my target page.

Jaryd Krause:

So all of these reporting pages have an internal link or at least one internal link to that target page, hub page, or killer page that people might go to, is that right?

Kyle Roof:

That’s exactly right.

Jaryd Krause:

And so with the trustworthiness of each topic page because all of these key words that are ranked with their own supporting pages are holding up that target page and adding weight and value to it, is that what you are saying?

Kyle Roof:

Exactly right. So its one of those things where you are covering the authority part of it and getting in to the topical authority where you are answering everything, and in doing so, you know links are votes and link equity is trust in the sense that it does tie back into the trust part of the concept as you are passing more juice to the target page.

Jaryd Krause:

Great. So that’s about the internal links; can backlinks from other sites work in the same way? Correct me if I am wrong and this is just an open discussion; this is not me. I am not the SE here, Kyle, but you are. As far as I know, you have been in this space longer than me and have been around more. But the back links, say you have your target page—if you are getting back links to that target page, that’s going to help with the authority of that piece as well, right? Then the authority from the target page will trickle down to supporting articles, with the internal linking going to those supporting pages from the target page. Is that what happens?

Kyle Roof:

In that sense, the links will pass authority for sure, but I would say that for an EAT evaluation, I wouldn’t be terribly concerned about backlinks. I would make sure I knocked out all of these things on my own site first, as I think that’s what this would require, because when I think Google is going to come and do this type of evaluation, I don’t know if it’s going to use your backlinks, They certainly might, and it makes a lot of sense, but I would focus on my own site for this particular evaluation first.

Aside from that, you are absolutely correct that those types of links are the whole idea that this site is saying that this is good content, this is trustworthy, this is authoritative, and that does mesh very well within all those EAT type concepts and makes a lot of sense. I am just saying that if I were approaching this, where would I start, I wouldn’t start with backlinks; I would start with these other factors that are on my own site first before doing that type of work.

Jaryd Krause:

It makes sense from one of the philosophies that I carry, which is that you start the growth from within, and that’s basically in the camp of on page SEO, which is the site structure and schema, and then move into creating content and covering more topics.

Kyle Roof:

Yeah, exactly right. 100% correct.

Jaryd Krause:

Where do you see some people stuffing this up?

Kyle Roof:

Most of the people who want to know how to stuff it up are really upset because they realize their sites are inappropriate, and I think they lash out. That’s where I think it comes from, but somebody recently went to www.kyleroof.com which is my site where you can see my stuff, and they were like, You don’t have an address on your site. And I was like, You are right, I am not trying to rank for anything, and that site is purely a brand promotion of myself, and that’s all that it is. So if you don’t care about ranking, you don’t have to worry about any of those. If you have a site, and a lot of sites are there for this purpose and are literally an extension of a business card like what my site is, then you can ignore it.

You don’t have to worry about it because if you get to certain places and you probably never will, as again, your site doesn’t have any pages besides the home page, there is nothing to the site other than just who I am. In that situation, don’t worry about it if you are not trying to rank for anything. The other complaint that I saw was that I went to mcdonalds.com and they don’t have an address, and I was like, Well, on the flip side, once you are already a trillion dollars business, you too can ignore EAT signals. At that point, you are well known enough to Google to pass any EAT evaluation. So if you are anywhere between McDonald's and Kyleroof.com in what you are trying to do, then you might want to look at these factors.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, I mean, people that are googling McDonalds need to know that they have addresses on Google in multiple locations that are buying them more authority and trust than many websites combined, so it will be hard to beat the authority of McDonalds.

Kyle Roof:

I think they are doing okay.

Jaryd Krause:

What’s one other common misconception that you have seen people have when it comes to "I need to build this EAT that is misguided?"

Kyle Roof:

I think it’s the last type of problem that people have in general, and they really get bogged down in the weeds rather than realizing that it's better to do something than just do nothing, just do something, and often they get really into the nitty gritty of this, you know, should I have this little thing here, and the point is just to do as much as you can. Don’t get bogged down in little things that, ultimately, probably don’t matter. Checking off boxes as quickly as you can and getting that stuff out there on your site—don't let perfection get in the way of progress or actually doing something.

Jaryd Krause:

I love it. Kyle, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for coming on, and where can we send people, I am going to have a bunch of links, but I am probably just going to send them to Page Optimizer Pro, which is your tool, and then HVSEO, which is your agency, and maybe internetmarketing.gold, and what is Internet Marketing Gold, just so people know?

Kyle Roof:

That’s the place where I have my courses, and you actually get access to 40 other courses that other people have put together on ranging topics in SEO, and that’s all where my tests are.

Jaryd Krause:

Check it out, guys the Page Optimizer Pro, HV SEO, and Internet Marketing Gold. Kyle, thanks for coming on, and I can’t wait for the next one.

Kyle Roof:

Thanks so much, I really appreciate it.