Seems Nobody Can Tell You What EEAT Actually Is. So I Will.

Every SEO on LinkedIn is banging on about E-E-A-T. Almost none of them can tell you what it actually means. So let’s fix that. Hi, I’m Nikki Pilkington. My site is https://nikki-pilkington.com/ and in this episode of "SEO F**king What", I’m taking apart two things you’ve been told matter enormously by people who, if you push them, probably couldn’t tell you where either one came from. E-E-A-T and helpful content. One is a description of what good looks like, written for contractors who can’t touch your rankings. The other stopped existing as a separate thing in March 2024. Neither of them is a score, and nobody can sell you one. Here’s what I’m covering: — What the four letters actually stand for, and where the extra E came from in December 2022 — The 180-page free PDF that E-E-A-T lives in, who Google gives it to, and why those people are mystery shoppers rather than traffic wardens — Why there is no E-E-A-T score sitting in a database marking your website out of 10 — and why it still matters anyway — Why trust is the one that counts, and how you can have all the expertise in the world and still be worth very little — YMYL, why a page about chemotherapy is held to a stricter standard than a page about scented candles, and where a small B2B business actually sits — What happened to the helpful content update, and why anyone offering to recover you from one is selling you a thing that no longer exists — The three questions Google published for free — who, how and why — and the one that catches everybody out — Why the E-E-A-T audit grift works so well, and why a headshot and a byline is not expertise I also give you a proper piece of homework. Not the "might do that one day" kind. The actual do-it-this-week kind. Three pages, three questions. If you know someone who’s been quoted two grand for an E-E-A-T audit, or who’s been told that adding author schema will conjure expertise out of nowhere, send them this. It might save them an invoice. Get found. Make money. Stop stressing. Stop paying for a score that doesn’t exist. Links mentioned: Non-Wanky SEO Courses — the On-Page SEO Toolkit is completely free right now: https://nonwankyseo.com Google’s own "Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content" page — this is the free thing with the who/how/why questions on it: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content Google announcing the extra E, December 2022 (the Search Quality Rater Guidelines PDF downloads from this page): https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/12/google-raters-guidelines-e-e-a-t Google folding the helpful content system into the core algorithm, March 2024: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies Episode 15 — the AI search audit racket: https://seofuckingwhatpodcast.co.uk/episode/dont-be-conned-into-paying-for-an-ai-search-optimisation-audit-ffs Episode 18 — auditing your whole site page by page: https://seofuckingwhatpodcast.co.uk/episode/you-havent-read-your-own-website-have-you-time-for-a-content-audit Follow Nikki: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikkipilkington/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikkipilkington/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/nikkipilkington.bsky.social Mentioned in this episode: ICN Network