Question 1

What does E-E-A-T mean in Google's guidelines?

Accepted Answer

**E-E-A-T** stands for **Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust**. It comes from Google's **Search Quality Rater Guidelines**, the document given to the human contractors who assess search result quality.

**The crucial clarification, which is widely misunderstood: E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor.** There is no E-E-A-T score. Quality raters do not affect the rankings of the pages they assess. Their ratings are used to **evaluate whether algorithm changes improved results**, and the guidelines describe the **qualities Google is trying to reward** — so they tell you what the systems aim at, not how they compute it.

**The four components:**

**Experience** — the newest addition, introduced in 2022. Has the creator actual first-hand experience of the subject? A review written by someone who used the product differs from one assembled from specifications.

**Expertise** — relevant knowledge or skill. Note that expertise can be formal or informal; the guidelines explicitly recognise everyday expertise, such as someone writing about living with a condition.

**Authoritativeness** — being recognised as a go-to source in the field, by others rather than by self-description.

**Trust** — described in the guidelines as the **most important** of the four, with the others supporting it. Is the page accurate, honest, safe and reliable?

**Why it matters most for YMYL.** **Your Money or Your Life** topics — health, finance, legal, safety, major life decisions — are held to a much higher standard, because poor information causes real harm. Standards for a recipe page are lower than for a page about medication.

**What actually helps in practice:** demonstrable first-hand experience; identifiable authors with relevant credentials; citations to primary sources; accurate, maintained content; clear contact and ownership information; and being cited by other reputable sources.

**What does not help:** adding an author box with no substance behind it.

Question 2

What are Core Web Vitals, and do they actually affect rankings?

Accepted Answer

A small set of metrics measuring loading, interactivity and visual stability as experienced by real users — and the honest answer on rankings is that they are a genuine but weak signal, far less

Question 3

Does structured data actually help SEO?

Accepted Answer

Structured data is standardised markup added to a page's HTML describing what its content means — that this string is a price, that one is an author, this is a recipe's cooking time. The vocabulary

Question 4

What is a content audit and when do you need one?

Accepted Answer

A content audit is a systematic inventory and assessment of everything published on a site, evaluating each page against performance data and business purpose, then deciding what to keep, improve,

Question 5

What is search intent and why does it matter more than keyword volume?

Accepted Answer

Search intent is what someone is actually trying to accomplish when they type a query. It matters more than search volume because a page that ranks for a high-volume keyword while misreading the

Question 6

What is lead scoring, and does it actually work?

Accepted Answer

Assigning numerical values to leads based on who they are and what they have done, so sales attention goes to those most likely to buy. It works when built on evidence and fails — commonly — when

Question 7

What is a nofollow link and does link building still work?

Accepted Answer

A nofollow link carries an HTML attribute (rel="nofollow") telling search engines not to pass ranking credit through it. It was introduced in 2005 to combat comment spam, and became the standard

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