The origins of E-A-T: Page content, hyperlink analysis and usage data

Knowledge of the past is important for predicting the future. I keep an eye on technology but never forget the past.
The possibilities of where to next in search technology are conjured by past achievements.

I want to know what impact it will have on search engine optimization techniques and methodologies.
In the last part of my “back to the future” series, I showed a graphic that explained the “abundance problem.” The more authoritative pages are often prevented from being placed at the top of the results. Yes, it’s relevant. Is it authoritative?

The E-A-T may have been around for a while. It has always been at the center of how and what search engines do.
I will look at how far back expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness go and what they are actually based on.
20 years ago, the phrase ‘E-A-T’ was used.

There is still a lot of confusion about whatitativeness actually means in the world of search engine marketing. How does a page get authoritative?

Looking at the terms authority, expert, and trust can give you more information.
This version of the graphic I created in 2002 has an enhancement that ties it all together.

I will use this classic web data mining graphic to help build a better understanding of its origin.
E-A-T is not a program.

page content is connected to expertise.
hyperlink analysis is connected to authority.
A combination of page content and hyperlink analysis is needed for trust.

The data mining aspects must be combined in a way that gives the most authoritative pages to the end user. It is a series of ranking mechanisms.

I have been a member of the Association for Computing Machinery for many years and am proud to be a member of theSIGIR. My main area of focus is hyperlink analysis.

This is one of the most fascinating areas of IR. Over the years, I have been told that not all links are equal. Some are better than others.

That is a good start for the next epic read.

Text-based ranking techniques have evolved into hyperlink-based ones.

The fundamental reason that links are essential to all search engines is covered in less than a minute.
Social network analysis has a long history. The idea of networks and network theory has seen a lot of interest in the past 20 years. This simply means a pattern of connections between things.
Social networks have been around for a long time by companies such as Meta. Social ties between friends have been studied for a long time. There are so many networks.
One experiment in the field that became very famous outside the scientific community is called “Six Degrees of Separation.”

There are networks on the web. Jon Kleinberg, one of the world’s leading computer scientists, was interested in the hyperlink structure of the web in 1998. The three produced two of the most influential hyperlink analysis ranking methods.

The web has no preference over a single link. There is a link.

In 1998, when Page and Brin presented a paper at a conference in Australia, they made this statement:
There are pages that are well cited that are worth looking at.
They endorsed the fact that not all links are equal when they followed up with this.

Pages that only have one citation from the Yahoo home page are worth looking at.
Over the years, I’ve kept my focus on developing a more elegant approach to link attraction techniques and practices because of that last statement.
I am going to explain something about my approach that I feel will change the way you think about what is referred to as “link building” and “reputation building”

The word “authority” is used when talking about the internet giant. That is not where the term came from.
Although they used the word “link” in their paper, they didn’t use the word “citation” This is due to the analysis of citations.

The analysis of the links from one document to another is what it is called. Identifying the most important documents in a collection is a common aim.

The earliest example of citation analysis was the discovery of the most authoritative sources. Its overarching science is known as bibliometrics, which is related to the social network analysis and network theory categories.
In the simplest way, I showed how the web linkage data was viewed by the search engine.

Links on web pages are used to find information. Other links can give access to other pages which add to the page’s contents. The Chief Scientist AltaVista pointed out that a web page author is likely to create a link from one page to another because of its relevancy. Most people list good resources. Few people would say that those pages are the worst they have ever seen and link to them on their own pages.
That’s right.
Many links point to high quality pages with clear and concise information. Low quality pages will have less links than high quality pages. Search results can be improved by hyperlink analysis. The major search engines now use some type of link analysis.

A hyperlink from page A to page B is a recommendation of page B by the author.
That’s right.
An un directed co-citation graph is also used in hyperlink based computations. If there is a third page C which links both to A and B, A and B are connected by an un directed edge.

The second part of the book had more information on it. It is a little confusing and I will give a simplistic one here.

It is important to understand the strengths of both citations and co- citations.

There are direct links in the first illustration. If page ‘c’ links to ‘a’ and ‘b’ and then page ‘d’ links to ‘a’ and ‘b’, what you can assume is that.
What would a real-life example of that look like?
There are lists to start with. There are pages with the top ten best-selling laptops, the top ten sports personalities, or the top ten rock stars.
Where does this HITS formula come from?

Kleinberg was analyzing results at the top search engines at the same time Page and Brin were working on their PageRank. He didn’t think they were relevant to the query, and they produced very little results.
He searched for the term “Japanese automotive manufacturer” and found that none of the major names such as Toyota and Nissan appeared anywhere in the results.

He noticed that none of the major manufacturers had the words “Japanese automotive manufacturer” in the text on their website pages.
AltaVista didn’t show up in its own results because he searched for the term “search engine” To give a clue as to how relevant certain web pages were to a given query, he started and focused on the connection of web pages.

He came up with the HITS algorithm, which took the top thousand or more pages after a search at AltaVista and ranked them according to their Interconnectivity.
He used the link structure to form a network and identify what he called “Hubs and Authorities.”

That is where the word AUTHORITY came from. Kleinberg’s thesis title wasitative sources in a hyperlinked environment.
There are a lot of links on the hub pages. The more authority a hub gets, the more it links to it. It’s also reinforcing. A good hub can be a good authority as well.

Back in 2002, I visualized this as a prize for my graphic- creating skills. A hub is a place that links out to other places inside a web community.
What is a “web community” then?

A web page data community is a collection of web pages that have their own logical and semantic structures.

The web page community considers each web page to be a whole object rather than a piece of information.

It is able to reflect the web data nature. The colors represent different communities on the web.

Links from within your community carry more prestige than those from outside.

20 years ago, I explained how important it was to identify communities this way.

A lot of information about structure, communities, and hierarchy can be provided by pages pointing to otherpages. The intellectual structure and social networks of the web can be identified by using this methodology. There are a lot of problems with using methods of citation and co-citation analysis to deal with hundreds and hundreds of millions of documents.
The web has communities and neighborhoods. It’s not real in the sense of where you live and who you hang out with. The web has a “sociological” to it. Music lovers from different cultures and time zones are very much a part of the internet community. The same as art lovers and people from every walk of life who post their information to the web and form these communities.

Search marketers rely on daily newsletters.

What is the difference between the two?

There are many similarities between the PageRank and HITS methods of ranking websites.
There’s a bigger difference.
HITS is dependent on the number of words in the title.
You get your authority score regardless of the community as it was previously a static global score.

The authority score is built around the words that pull the community together. I don’t want to go too deep here because it takes too long and beyond the scope of this part.
The term’expert’ was introduced by the algorithm.

It’s important, but gets less attention. In professional circles, there’s a strong belief that it was merged into Google’s processes in 2003 when the Florida update happened.
The Hilltop algorithm was developed by Krishna Bharat in 1999 and is a real game-changing innovation.
He was working for a research center that owned the AltaVista search engine. His paper was about using non-affiliated experts to rank popular topics. He described it this way.

The most authoritative pages on the query topic would be placed at the top of the ranking. There is a special index of expert documents. The directories of links to non-affiliated sources are a subset of the pages on the World Wide Web. The results are ranked based on the match between the query and descriptive text for hyperlinks on expert pages pointing to the result page.

This is where the term “expert” was first used. When other people link to your page, it’s considered to be an expert page. The terms “expert” and “authority” can be used in different ways.
The use of the term “non-affiliated” is something that should be noted carefully. It’s possible that that gives a clue as to why many affiliate marketers were hit so hard.
It’s important to note that people refer to “authority sites” in the community, which is not a thing. Search engines return web pages after a query, not websites.
The more links you attract from other expert pages, the more authority you gain, and the more prestige you can add to it. Building a reputation within the community isn’t just being a link collector.

I know that sometimes people have difficulty imagining what it would be like to be recognized as an expert in a web community.
In my research work for many years, I came across a piece of technology developed by two Japanese scientists. They were able to output their results in a visually pleasing way.
They built a web community around computer manufacturers. I used this part of the output to help everyone get a better idea of the idea.

This shows how broad and deep a web community can be.
How did trust come to be?

There are a lot of things that go into “expertise” and “authoritativeness.”
Trust falls into the area of hyperlink analysis. The “expert pages” that are trusted to discover and weed out junk mail have been the subject of a lot of effort. It’s easier to spot and eliminate those connections with the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The “TrustRank” was developed back in the day and is what it is today. The acid test for trust happens with the end user.
Search engines try to deliver results that are relevant to users’ needs. The data on which pages pass the web community test and which ones fail the end user test is provided by user access patterns.
Links from other websites can be seen as a vote for your content. Millions of end users who don’t have web pages can’t vote, how can they?
They do it with their trust, either by clicking on certain results or not.
If end users aren’t consuming your content, what’s the point of returning it in the results?

You don’t get to say you’re an expert on your own pages.
You can claim to be an expert or authority in a certain field.
The search engines are asking who else thinks so.

You don’t say anything about yourself. It’s what other people say about you. You build a reputation in your community by doing that.
The quality raters are not determining if your content is expert or not. Their job is to find out if the search engine’s software is doing its job.
There is so much more to be covered in this subject. We don’t have time or space for now.
Next time, I’ll show you how important structured data is to your web community.
Enjoy the golden colors of fall as we slide into another season with great anticipation for the next read on the inner workings of search engines.
The guest author’s opinions are not necessarily those of the search engine. There are staff authors here.