Episode Details

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: