“E” in EEAT & SEO: Google vs AI-Generated Content

Google has been actively promoting the concept of the “first-hand” experience for many months now. The trend has become even hotter this year as Google is facing the alarming threat of AI-generated content flooding its index.

So how to adjust your SEO strategy to meet this extra “E” (for experience) requirement?

First, the timeline (let me know if I missed anything):

• 04/25/2022: Google’s reviews update has finished rolling out and the official review guidelines emphasize the importance of first-hand experience: “When recommending something as the best overall or the best for a certain purpose, include why you consider it the best, with first-hand supporting evidence”.
• 10/10/2022: Google replaces its Webmaster Guidelines with “Helpful content” guidelines that include “expertise”: “After identifying relevant content, our systems aim to prioritize those that seem most helpful. To do this, they identify a mix of factors that can help determine which content demonstrates aspects of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, or what we call E-E-A-T. ”?About the same time, Google also published an official explanation of their Core Updates that also includes a touch of the “E” in it “There may be other pages that are doing a better job of helping the searcher because they have first-hand knowledge on that topic”
• 12/15/2022: E-A-T gets an extra E for Experience in Google’s Quality Rating Guidelines: “Does content … demonstrate that it was produced with some degree of experience, such as with actual use of a product, having actually visited a place or communicating what a person experienced?”
• 09/27/2023: Finally, the most recent one: Google introduces new in structured data: discussion forum and profile page markup: “This markup works with Google Search features that are designed to show first-person perspectives from social media platforms, forums, and other communities”

To add to this, we have also seen Google adding the “Discussions and forums” section to highlight those “first-hand perspectives” and “hidden gems”:

So it is pretty obvious that Google is serious about this.

What should we do?

Well, obviously, we need to highlight the “first-hand experience” whenever we can. Here are a few ideas:

• First things first: Establish your topical authority
• If you allow contributors on your site, include the “first-hand experience” requirement in your writing guidelines. I have seen a few great travel blogs that require things like “pictures that were taken by the contributor”, insider travel tips that you didn’t find anywhere until you went there, etc.
• Create a detailed About page and author bios
• Include detailed screenshots, videos, pictures - any proof that you actually used a product or a tactic you are writing about
• Include legit social proof (reviews, testimonials) linking to a source (e.g. TrustPilot) and/or a person who left it.
• For ecommerce sites, encourage your customers to upload pictures of them using your product, pull pictures from Instagram/videos from Youtube/TikTok of them using your product (yes, influencer outreach and collaboration), etc.
• If you have an affiliate program, encourage your affiliates to write content that includes their personal experience with your product.
• Start a branded subreddit! More on Reddit-driven tactics here.

Overall, we don’t quite know how Google automatically detects first-hand experience but I am sure they have had enough time to figure that out. So instead of trying to “fake” it, try and make it!