 Fun fact, I've only met just two people in the SEO industry whose name has several letters and love DJing. I'm one, and the next speaker, Lily Ray, is the other person. When she's not DJing at night, in the day, Lily is one of the leading experts with authority and trust when it comes to the topic of Google's EAT. Lily is the SEO director at Amsive Digital, previously called Path Interactive, where she leads an award-winning SEO team that specializes in creative forward-thinking SEO strategies for clients in the variety of verticals, such as help, finance, publishing, e-commerce, and more. Today, she will show you how EAT ecosystem has transformed organic search. See you soon. Welcome to From the Medic Update to Now, how the EAT ecosystem has transformed organic search. My name is Lily Ray, and I'm the senior director of SEO and head of organic research at Amsive Digital, formerly Path Interactive. So back in the day, SEO used to be pretty simple. You might remember logging on to seomas.org, maybe OpenSite Explorer, making sure that you're ranking for all the right keywords, and you're including those keywords in your title tags, in your H1s, in your meta keywords, maybe checking OpenSite Explorer for some new high domain authority links that you could get pointing back to your site. But around 2016, things kind of started to change for SEO. And if you take a step back and look at the broader context of what was happening in the world at that point, there started to be these conversations around the rise of fake news and misinformation, and the news and media, and on the internet as well. In 2016, there were these two articles published by a great journalist named Carol Cadwalader on The Guardian, in which she talked about the situation in which she was googling some kind of politically charged controversial queries. And she was noticing that on Google, the results that were showing up were kind of extremist and dangerous information, and probably not the type of content that Google wanted to be surfacing in the top results. And this wasn't the only article of its kind. This started this discussion about the rise of fake news and misinformation, not only on Google, but on the other search engines, as well as the major social media platforms, ultimately leading to movies like the social dilemma that came out last year that talk about the impact that this is having on society at all. And so how has Google responded to these conversations and to these issues? Well, back in 2016, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, stated that there's no situation in which fake news should be distributed on Google, and they're all for doing a better job here. In 2016, Google actually explicitly started to invest a lot of money into the fight against fake news and misinformation online, specifically with the Google News Initiative, which was aimed at reducing the visibility of misinformation and fake news, and making sure that they were elevating trustworthy high quality content across the news landscape. Later in 2020, Google released this really fantastic video called Trillions of Questions, No Easy Answers. I highly encourage all digital marketers to watch it, because this talks about fundamentally how search works, a lot of the different issues that Google's been dealing with related to misinformation and combating spam. And one of the most interesting takeaways that I've found in this movie was what they talk about as it relates to the rise of and the importance of authority over relevance for certain controversial or politically charged queries. So what does that look like? Well, if you look at the rankings of a variety of different keywords, Google's basically going to apply this different weighting of authority depending on what the query is. So on the left here, we have some queries where maybe authoritativeness is not so important. Things like puppy photos, how to fold a t-shirt, apple pie recipe, doesn't necessarily matter how authoritative the publication is writing on these topics because they don't have a huge material impact on the user's safety or health or well-being. On the right, we have the opposite end of the spectrum. So we have keywords like the keto diet, 401k calculator, the COVID-19 vaccine, heart attack. These are what we call your money or life queries, where the safety of the user is at stake, and it's going to be extremely important for Google to elevate authoritative content. In 2018 throughout 2021, Google's published a variety of different documents that talk about these same topics. So what Google's doing to combat disinformation, how Google can elevate great content in products like Google News and Google Discover, what Google's doing on YouTube to combat misinformation, what Google did during the coronavirus pandemic to make sure that misinformation wasn't circulating. And if you read these documents, there's a common phrase that's used throughout pretty much all of them. And if you know me and you've seen my work, you probably know what this phrase is. It's EAT, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. So EAT is an acronym that Google created about in 2014 or so in the Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, which is a document that Google uses to train its search quality evaluators in tests that it conducts thousands of times every year to make sure that the quality of the content that it's surfacing is meeting the needs of its users. And one of the things that it asks its evaluators to look at is the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of the results of the people who are creating the results, the websites that contain that content, the creators of that content. And EAT is used hundreds of times throughout this document and various other Google documents as a way of evaluating quality content. Now, when we talk about SEO, there's all these kinds of ranking factors and different tactics that people use like structured data and optimizing keywords and page speed and HTTPS. I personally believe that EAT is becoming so important in the SEO ecosystem that even if you're doing all those other things right and you're optimizing all those other page elements, EAT is actually overtaking the organic search landscape in a way that you can't ignore this if you're doing SEO, especially when it comes to your money or your life content. And it's not just organic search where EAT is surfacing, it's it's head, it's actually all throughout the organic search ecosystem. So we have in the center of this EAT ecosystem, we have organic search and Google's knowledge graph where EAT is of course of the utmost importance, but that's not the only product. So we have Google News, Google Discover in which Google specifically talked about the role that EAT plays in these products. In Google Maps, we have things like attributes of the business, reviews of the business, Google Play Store, it's very important that Google surfacing high quality apps in the Play Store, YouTube, there's all kinds of documentation about what Google's doing to combat misinformation and fake news across YouTube, featured snippets, you can't have information that contradicts scientific historical or medical consensus in featured snippets. Google's actually rolled out a new feature in Google Images where it's able to provide fact checking information if the image has any potential misinformation impacts. And a lot of other kind of examples of how EAT is permeating throughout Google's ecosystem. I personally believe that EAT is Google's solution for elevating truth and reducing misinformation online. So what's the outcome of some of these changes that Google's made in its algorithms and throughout its different products over the last few years? Well it really started in around 2017 and here if you look at these charts and you see these blue letters, these are indicative of Google's broad core algorithm updates. So in 2017, we saw a huge reduction in SEO visibility for websites that are classified by ad fonts media who classifies different types of news publishers as fake news conspiracy and misinformation websites. And you can see right after the time that Google said they're going to be combating fake news, in 2017 these websites were essentially wiped off the map in terms of SEO visibility to the point now where it's very hard to see them ranking for really any keyword. In 2018 this trend continued to what we call Your Money Your Life or YMYL keywords and websites. So mostly starting with the medic update which we're going to be talking about today on August 1st of 2018 and the subsequent core updates after that were seeing a huge decline in visibility among websites that contradict what Google's kind of looking for in terms of accuracy, high quality, high EAT content, especially as it relates to your money or your life topics. So just to take a step back and define the medic update, this is an informal name for the August 1st of 2018 core update that disproportionately impacted health and medical websites as well as other websites in the Your Money Your Life category like maybe finance, parenting, wellness, things like that. I personally work on sites with my agency that fall into these categories and the impact was very, very clear. We had some examples when we woke up during the medic update and had lost 60, 70, 80 percent of our traffic for some health and medical websites. So it was a really big deal. Now that's not to say that this is the only core algorithm update. There's been plenty throughout the history of Google, some like the Panda update of 2011, Penguin in 2012, Hummingbird and RankBrain. These have also been massive, massive Google algorithm updates that have had a huge impact on the visibility of different domains and different categories of domains. So I just want to be clear that it's not the only core update, but there's something very different about the medic updates and the subsequent updates that have taken place ever since. What I find very interesting about these updates is that you can have great technical SEO, highly optimized content, a solid website architecture, really fast load times, maybe even great core web vitals, and you can still lose 80 percent of your traffic overnight. Now, just to be clear, not every website is impacted by these core updates, but for the ones that are, it can literally mean life or death for the business. If you look at some of the responses of sites that have seen big declines over the last few years of the broad core updates that Google has rolled out, you can see the response that some of these sites are having. So they're saying Google becomes evil. We're being censored for, you know, plummeting our web traffic. We're shutting down after Google's core update, or in some cases, they're even suing Google because of the impacts that this has had on their organic traffic. So what I want to do today is talk about what's happened on a broader scale, who are the winners and losers of SEO visibility since the medic update until May of 2021. So the methodology that I use to analyze visibility changes over time, in addition to what I'm doing with the work that we do with our clients at Amps of Digital, and a lot of the data that we collect there, is that I maintain this list of 1700 plus domains that I've been analyzing over time, using the Cystrix Visibility Index, which tracks visibility of a given domain in Google.com organic search in the US index at any given point in time. So I'm going to be comparing August 1st of 2018, which is the medic update compared to May 1st of 2021. I then use similar web to classify the domains so we can look at visibility changes on the category level at scale. I'm also using the Wayback Machine, also known as archive.org, to see if websites have changed their content in any meaningful way during the past three years. So what are the results of these changes? Well, in terms of the categories that have seen the greatest percentage growth in visibility over the past three years, we have cooking and recipe websites, arts and entertainment, social media, which in many cases is just due to the fact that there's a lot more users of these social media platforms, but also some examples where Google appears to be ramping up the rankings of these sites. And I do want to talk today about public health and safety as well as photography and why we're seeing increases across those sites as well. Some of the major categories that have seen declines over the last three years are religion and spirituality. We have humor content, which contains a lot of user-generated content sites, adult content, some smaller marketplaces, as well as natural medicine websites, which we'll definitely talk about today. So in terms of the greatest visibility gains by domain, some of the most clear winners here are the utmost examples of EAT. So we have Healthline, which is a health website that does a really great job demonstrating EAT throughout its content. We have the CDC and the Mayo Clinic, which in and of themselves are authorities on the topics of health and safety. We also have Investopedia, which is a site that does a really good job demonstrating good EAT on financial topics. And a lot of other sites listed here are doing a great job with their EAT as well. So between the medic update to now, what exactly changed? So I've been looking for hours at hundreds of different keywords that have seen major, major changes between the medic update and 2021. So these are some examples of the keywords that we'll talk about. So we have liver spots, wrinkles, chakras, home remedies for acne, heart attack, wheatgrass juice, all of these kind of charged keywords that have a lot of different opinions on different ends of the spectrum. And you can see that Google's made really clear changes in terms of who gets to rank for these keywords. So what are some examples of that? In July of 2018, if you looked at the rankings for the keyword hydrogen peroxide, you're going to see a lot of kind of mommy bloggers, natural wellness websites, sites like natural living ideas or wellness mama, maybe talking about some practical DIY uses for hydrogen peroxide. If you look at the top 10 results now in May of 2021, you're going to see that it's health line, the spruce, Cleveland clinic, chemical safety facts, much more authoritative sites to be able to talk about a potentially dangerous chemical. Next, we have natural cough remedies. So in 2018, again, we had natural wellness websites like natural living ideas, Dr. Axe, who's very well known for natural wellness, everyday routes and common sense home. So kind of the DIY blogs about ways to use different products that you might have around the house. In 2021, we see a complete reversal. So again, we see health line, WebMD, the Mayo Clinic, very trusted health and medical authorities who are now able to rank for natural cough remedies. If we look at the keyword baby gender, pretty similar trend back in 2018, we had more mommy bloggers talking about parenting and your baby gender and naming your babies and things like that. In 2021, we're seeing what to expect, which is a very well trusted authority in this space. Again, health line, the Southwestern Medical Center, the bump, much more authoritative news sources than what we saw a few years ago. Now for the keyword crystal healing, back in 2018, you might have seen some lifestyle magazines or some natural wellness sites that are talking about different ways that you can actually use crystals to improve your health. In May of 2021, we see more science oriented news publishers, health publishers that are talking a little bit more about, well, this isn't exactly based in science. So kind of a reversal of the type of content that we saw in 2018. So what exactly were losing sites doing wrong? Well, one pretty obvious issue that a lot of these sites had is that they were missing or just had questionable authors. So if you look back in 2018, who was ranking for a variety of these pretty high volume keywords, you'll notice in many cases, they don't list who their author is. If they do list who the author is, they don't provide a lot of information about who they are, why we can trust them, what's what are their credentials, what's their expertise. And this is definitely something Google's made very explicitly clear throughout its documentation that it's really looking for information around who the authors are. There's also the issue of a really bad reputation. So this is something Google also makes very clear in its search quality guidelines. If there's a fundamental major reputation issue with the brand to the point where maybe customers are having a horrible experience there, or there's some type of issue related to fraud with the business or something along those lines, that appears to be impacting organic visibility. Now, we don't exactly know how Google's doing this, what websites it's pulling from. But there's a number of very clear examples in the data where if you look at the reputation of these sites, it seems to be that users are having a really, really hard time trusting this company and that's ultimately reflected in their organic performance. Next is deception. Google's pretty clear about this. You can actually tell Google or submit a form to Google when a site is doing something extremely deceptive, such as requiring payment to take down certain personal information about a given person. But there's other examples like what happened in 2019 when the IRS.com who's not really the IRS, dmv.org who's not really the dmv and medicare.com who's not really Medicare, they all completely disappeared from Google overnight. So there's definitely something that Google's paying attention to when it comes to deceiving users and that's something that they don't want to have in the search results. Lack of expertise and insufficient sourcing of claims appears to be a big problem. So this is content that I pulled from a site that was ranking number two for Niasen in 2018 and this guy's talking about I've become a Niasenaholic. I love the stuff. Not everybody can handle it, but I love it. It's a shock to the system, but I freaked out and but I love it and it's my new best friend. Obviously this is not great medical content, great medical advice. This site is no longer ranking in the top 100 for the word Niasen. Similarly, we have dangerous medical advice. So this was another article that was ranking really well for how to treat parasites. If you read the content this author was saying she uses a blend of herbs and then she includes all the different herbs that she uses to treat parasites. Of course in the final sentence she says you can find it through my website and you can buy all these herbs. That's a link to a product that she's selling. So it's not a great idea to try to sell a concoction of products to treat a medical condition and includes like somewhat of an affiliate link when you're giving somebody medical advice. Next we have extremism hate and misinformation. So these are six sites that were labeled misleading and accurate or propaganda. Again, they've been completely wiped off the map in terms of SEO visibility over time and this is something Google's made very clear is that these sites should not be ranking especially for news queries. We also have excessive affiliate links and salesy language and informational content. So in these examples again this is this is information it's advice that the articles were trying to give. I think in this case it was how to treat acne at home and what the author was saying was well you can use this homemade laundry soap and that's selling his own product or maybe you can use these different ingredients of things you have in your kitchen and those are links to Amazon. So if you're kind of pushing the user to buy a product when you're giving them health or wellness or medical advice it's not a great look especially if you're not being very clear that those are affiliate links that are included in the concoction. Another issue that sites had was that they were a jack of all trades master of none. So this is an example of a site called List25 that just lists 25 random things on a variety of different topics. Back in 2018 they were able to rank for very high volume keywords like expensive shoe, Marvel characters, art piece, philosopher, extreme torture and in 2021 they're not ranking for any of these keywords and there's definitely a lot of issues with the site there's technical issues and the other things that are playing a role but I think one of the main problems that they have is that they're writing about too many different topics and they don't actually show real subject matter expertise in any of them. So what are 10 ways that Google's actually changed since the medic update? Number one is the increased visibility among highly authoritative health and medical publishers. So again we have Healthline, we have the CDC and the Mayo Clinic who either are medical authorities or are doing a really good job demonstrating authority through the way that they structure their content. Another example is the diet doctor so I've been using this page in my presentations for the past few years and every time I go back to it they're still finding iterative ways to convey good EAT throughout the content. So this page ranks really well for keto diet, they talk about who published it, who's the doctor that reviewed it, the fact that the content's evidence-based, if you actually click on any of these citations throughout the content you're going to get this pop-up that talks about where they got their information from, how much they trust that information and it really allows the user to make their own decision about how much they believe in the keto diet and it shows both sides of the story as well. There's also been this corresponding reduction in the visibility of natural wellness and pseudoscience websites. So here are a few major examples of sites that have been classified as such, natural wellness practitioners and natural wellness websites and you'll see that with the core updates of the last few years they've really lost a lot of their visibility on Google. Now mind body green which is shown here in red has actually been making significant changes to their content. If you use the Wayback Machine and you look at some of the ways that they're updating content they've been really improving their EAT and changing a lot of what's displayed on their website and you can see this slow and steady increase in visibility over the last year. Another thing Google's focusing on is the increase, this increase focused of accuracy in the search results. So again not just in regular search but also in things like featured snippet and Google images, Google's talking about how can we elevate the most accurate trustworthy information and reduce misinformation or fake news. So in featured snippets you can actually be removed from the featured snippet if the content that's included there is inaccurate or if it contradicts scientific or medical or historical consensus on a given topic. During coronavirus we definitely saw this with Google elevating content from the CDC above all else when it came to topics like wearing a mask or vaccines. In Google images Google actually is now enabling fact checking or claim review schema. If something is a picture that's concocted and it's misinformation there will actually be some labeling that says that this is not an accurate image. It's also important that authoritativeness ranks above relevancy for certain queries especially in times of crisis. So this is actually directly taken from Google's documentation. They say that EAT matters most when a crisis is developing and we saw that play out during the coronavirus pandemic. So this is some data that was given to me by a company called Traject and what they did was they tracked the rankings of sites across 1,339 coronavirus keywords throughout 2020 just to see which sites ranked the most and the New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, NPR and the CDC were among the biggest winners. So these are very trusted news publications and of course in the case of the CDC that's really where the source of truth that Google was looking to in terms of coronavirus information. I presented about this during the coronavirus pandemic but it really turned out that the CDC and the FDA were actually two of the biggest winners on Google throughout coronavirus especially around June of 2020. They saw huge surges and visibility and were ranking for a lot more keywords than just coronavirus keywords. For example the keyword hand sanitizer, we saw the FDA ranking in top positions whereas sites like maybe Amazon or Walmart were previously ranking number one and two. We also have this emphasis on transparency. So winning sites make it really clear who they are, who writes for them, how they make money on the sites, why they should be trusted. They have these robust about pages that talk about who they are as a brand, what are their advertising policies, who's the leadership that works there, why they can be trusted, diversity and inclusion, all these great things that really instill a lot of trust in the user. There's also been a big reduction in clickbait and deceptive headlines. Google's very clear about this. For example in Google Discover if you have clickbait that's something that can kind of just eliminate your visibility or preclude you from even ranking in Google Discover in the first place. So they're very clear about making sure that the headlines capture the essence of the content but not in a clickbait fashion. They recommend that sites avoid tactics that manipulate appeal by catering to morbid curiosity to deletion or outrage. So all these different things that Google's suggesting that make sure that the title of the article in Google Discover really reflects the content that the user's going to get on the page. There's also a more clear delineation between informational and transactional content and this is especially true for your money or your life websites. So Healthline is a great example of this. If you look at their advertising policies and their editorial policies they're very clear about how they choose to work with advertisers. You know, what does their affiliate program look like? They make it very clear that they're distinguishing between informational and transactional content and this again just instills a lot of trust in the user. There's also updated content policies across various Google products. So I found this very interesting but Google actually indicated that it can send out manual actions in Google News and Google Discover if you violate any of these content policies. Now there's some that are pretty obvious like having dangerous content, hateful content, harassing content, but if you read through this document there's actually some indication that Google can convene you or send you a manual action if you lack transparency or maybe it's not clear who your authors are or why they can be trusted. So it's very important to pay attention to that if you want to rank in Google News and discover. In Google's document about what webmasters should know about core updates they make it very clear that not only is content quality important, things like grammar and spelling and vocabulary and just the quality overall, but also making sure that the user understands who the author is, why they should be trusted, what are their credentials, etc. There's also this rise of niche sites with very strong EAT and robust content strategies. So these are some of the EAT winners that I've been focusing on over the last few years. So sites like Birdie, Bob Villa, The Spruce, Money Under 30 are doing a very good job conveying throughout every page on their site why they can be trusted, who wrote the content, who reviewed the content, what citations are they pulling from, what are they doing in terms of fact checking their content and this you know you see these sites surging in visibility over the past few years and they continue to iterate on these EAT initiatives because the landscape is becoming increasingly competitive. There's also been an overall reduction in adult content as well as an increase in stock photography sites. So back in 2018 if you Google the variety of kind of ambiguous keywords for example teenage girls, you might have seen some adult sites ranking in the top positions. Now you'll largely see stock photography websites and this includes Pinterest not only Pinterest.com but a variety of different international versions of Pinterest where Google appears to just be showing stock photography websites are Pinterest for keywords that are maybe a little bit ambiguous and they used to surface adult content and this was actually an explicit change that they made to the algorithms in 2019 to try to make sure that they're reducing adult content unless the users specifically looking for that. There's also extra scrutiny on affiliate websites so definitely pay attention to what Google's been doing in 2021 they had the product review update they're really looking to make sure that if you are an affiliate website not only do you make it very clear that you're linking to products on that site for the user to buy but you're also providing unique value that they can't get on any other website. So it's increasingly important to make sure you're not just regurgitating the same content that can be found for example in the product description on a bunch of other websites but you're actually providing unique expert value in the content. So as recovery from core updates possible it is indeed but it's certainly not easy and implementing EAT tactics to recover from a core update is a long game so for example things that I work on with my clients and my team when we're helping sites recover from core updates we're doing a lot of updating removing redirecting or consolidating underperforming content especially content that might be perceived as very low quality or dangerous. We're ensuring that we're demonstrating sufficient EAT to address certain topics if the client is not a true authority on a certain topic we might recommend even removing that content if it's not performing well. We increase transparency and trust throughout our content making sure that we're working with experts whenever necessary or maybe bringing in expert contributors. We're also optimizing website architecture and using structured data to really transmit to search engines and to users who are the experts that are working with us what is all this relevant information about our brand and our organization just making sure that's clear throughout the content. So again the landscape is becoming increasingly competitive SEO is really becoming a lot more complex than it used to be and you should be reasonable with your expectations for organic growth especially if you've been hit by a core update it can take a very long time to recover. So I strongly recommend that you put EAT at the forefront of your SEO strategy and thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your MozCon.