When it boils down to it, every idea in SEO can be understood as a set of measurements we use to rank one page over another. And that means that when it comes to measuring a concept like the authoritativeness of your content, there are almost certainly factors that you can analyze and tweak to improve it.
But if Google were to use a measure of content authority, what might go into it? Against what yardstick should SEOs be measuring their content's E-A-T? In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Russ Jones walks us through a thought experiment as to what exactly might constitute a "content authority" score and how you can begin to understand your content's expertise like Google.
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Video Transcription
Hey, folks, this is Russ Jones here with another Whiteboard Friday, and today we're going to have fun. Well, at least fun for me, because this is completely speculative. We're going to be talking about this concept of content authority and just some ideas around ways in which we might be able to measure it.
Maybe Google uses these ways to measure it, maybe not. But at the same time, hopefully what we'll be able to do is come up with a better concept of metrics we can use to get at content authority.
Now, we know there's a lot of controversy around this. Google has said quite clearly that expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are very important parts of their Quality Rater Guidelines, but the information has been pretty flimsy on exactly what part of the algorithm helps determine exactly this type of content.
We do know that they aren't using the quality rater data to train