Google has been tackling thousands of issues since it was first launched back in Sept. 1997. Since then, they have been working eagerly on improving their service (and, as we know, pushing their paid services) in a huge variety of ways.
One issue has been an ongoing theme, and Google is still looking for ways to overcome this weakness: content quality.
Multiple algorithm updates (the best known is "Panda") have all been launched in an attempt to improve the quality of sites ranking in Google, and thus provide a better user experience (and this way keep attracting users to their search engine).
Then, the Penguin update focussed on eliminating the ability to improve rankings with low quality, non-authoritative and irrelevant links.
Now, for the last 1-2 years, a concept called E-A-T (short for Expertise, Authorititveness, Trustworthyness) has been seeing quite a rise in attention within the SEO community, SEO conferences etc.
What's behind E-A-T is really Google's desparate need to be able to contrast information, and make sure whoever is the author of any piece of content, really knows what they're talking about.
They even have it in their search quality raters' guidelines (you knew Google had 10K human quality raters go manually through websites, right?):
What this means is that things like an about us page, references to where you got the information from, your personal brand, your social media profiles, speaking gigs, etc. suddenly get much more important than before. Speaking at an important conference might just be the piece your rankings are missing, so that Google rests assured about your knowledge in a certain subject matter.
The more you contrast the information you present, and your professional background, the more trustworthy your content gets, which will highly contribute to your rankings.
Would you like me to check out your site for free and confirm what you can do to improve your E-A-T?
