Google: E-A-T Less Important For E-Commerce Sites

Google‘s John Mueller said in a video hangout this morning at the 53:52 mark into that video that E-A-T is less important for e-commerce sites. E-A-T is more focused on sites where “the type of information is critical for the user, where they really need to know that they get the right information there,” he said.

John said E-A-T is related to Google’s search quality raters guidelines and someone asked about improving the E-A-T on his e-commerce site. John replied to that:

I don’t know specifically about E-A-T for e-commerce? E-A-T is something that we have in our quality rater guidelines and is more focus on kind of websites where the type of information is critical for the user, where they really need to know that they get the right information there.

So probably less the case for most e-commerce websites.

E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. No, Google does not have EAT scores but it is something a lot of SEOs are focused on when improving the overall quality of sites.

What John is saying is that E-A-T, at least for when the quality raters are rating sites (again, no direct impact on the search results), that when it comes to e-commerce sites, those raters do not need to look at the E-A-T of the pages as much as they would for when it comes to YMYL, health, medical, financial, types of sites.