🏢Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines
Google. Published by Google Search. Updated periodically.
Brass-SEO treats this as the primary definition of E-E-A-T. Google's Quality Rater Guidelines — 168 pages of instructions for contract human raters who evaluate search result quality — define Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness as the four dimensions raters use to assess whether a page is likely to be accurate and trustworthy. Experience was added as the fourth dimension in December 2022, expanding the prior E-A-T framework to account for first-hand knowledge in content claims. YMYL — Your Money or Your Life — designates page categories (health, finance, legal, safety) where rater standards are highest. Rater judgments do not directly change individual page rankings; they feed into training data for Google's ranking algorithms.
- Examines:
- Google's 168-page instruction manual for human quality raters — defines E-E-A-T, YMYL, and the full taxonomy of page quality signals raters are trained to assess.
- Brass-SEO draws on:
- The E-E-A-T framework and YMYL classification — the basis for Brass-SEO's content quality recommendations and the context for why certain pages face higher ranking scrutiny.
🏢Google Search Essentials
Google Search Central. Maintained by Google. (Formerly Google Webmaster Guidelines.)
Brass-SEO cites this when explaining what Google requires — not recommends — for indexing eligibility. The Search Essentials document defines the mandatory technical requirements (accessible pages, working server, no noindex blocks), spam policies (scaled content abuse, thin content, cloaking), and quality guidelines that determine whether Google will crawl, index, and rank a page. This document was formerly titled Google Webmaster Guidelines; it was renamed Search Essentials in 2022 and reorganized around must-do technical requirements versus best practices. The distinction between a technical requirement and a best practice determines whether a violation produces a manual action or a ranking signal reduction.
- Examines:
- Google's foundational rules — technical requirements, spam policies, and quality guidelines that determine whether Google will index and rank a page.
- Brass-SEO draws on:
- The technical requirement versus best practice taxonomy — cited in Brass-SEO's indexing checks and recommendations to correctly scope the severity of identified issues.
🏢What Creators Should Know About Google's Core Updates
Google Search Central. Maintained by Google.
Brass-SEO draws on this to explain traffic drops that align with core update dates. Google's core update documentation confirms that core updates are broad changes to how Google assesses overall content quality — not targeted at specific pages or sites for policy violations. A site losing rankings after a core update has not been penalized; its content has been re-evaluated against the current quality bar. Google explicitly states that the appropriate response is improving content quality, not technical fixes, and that rankings sometimes recover after subsequent core updates without any changes at all. Core updates also produce ranking recoveries for sites previously underranked — traffic changes go in both directions.
- Examines:
- Google's official explanation of what core updates are, why they affect rankings, and what constitutes an appropriate response for affected sites.
- Brass-SEO draws on:
- The 'core updates assess overall content quality, not policy violations' framing — cited when Brass-SEO's analysis identifies a traffic drop coinciding with a core update date.
📄Making Sense of Credibility on the Web
Metzger, M.J., 2007. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(13), 2078–2091.
Brass-SEO draws on this to establish the research foundation behind E-E-A-T's Trustworthiness and Authoritativeness dimensions. Metzger's literature review synthesizes credibility research and identifies the dual-process model of credibility evaluation: users apply a heuristic (peripheral) path — layout, design, surface cues — for most content, and an elaboration (systematic) path — source verification, corroboration — for high-stakes decisions. YMYL content falls squarely in the systematic path, where actual expertise evidence determines whether users trust the source. The practical implication is that demonstrating E-E-A-T signals matters most for the exact content categories Google flags as highest scrutiny.
- Examines:
- Literature review synthesizing research on how users evaluate web credibility — the dual-process model of heuristic versus systematic credibility assessment and its implications for information design.
- Brass-SEO draws on:
- The dual-process credibility evaluation model — cited as the academic antecedent to Google's E-E-A-T framework and the research basis for Brass-SEO's author attribution and trust signal recommendations.
📄How Do Users Evaluate the Credibility of Web Sites?
Fogg, B.J. et al., 2003. ACM DUX Conference Proceedings.
Brass-SEO uses this as empirical evidence for what signals shape perceived expertise and authority before users read content. Fogg et al. surveyed 2,684 participants evaluating websites across 10 categories and found that visual design was the most commonly cited factor in credibility assessments — both positive and negative. 94% of negative credibility judgments had a design component; only 6% cited information accuracy as the primary trigger. The implication for E-E-A-T optimization: users screen on design before they evaluate content quality, which means poor visual presentation can eliminate the opportunity to demonstrate expertise regardless of how authoritative the underlying information is.
- Examines:
- Large-scale empirical study of 2,684 web users identifying which visual and structural elements most frequently determine credibility judgments across 10 website categories.
- Brass-SEO draws on:
- The finding that visual design precedes information evaluation in credibility assessment — cited when Brass-SEO addresses page layout as part of trust signal recommendations alongside content quality.
🏢Article & Author Structured Data Guidance
Google Search Central. Maintained by Google.
Brass-SEO treats this as the machine-readable half of the E-E-A-T authorship signal. Google's Article structured data guidance recommends marking each author with the Person type, putting only the author's name in author.name (no titles, honorifics, or publisher name), and — strongly recommended — adding a url or sameAs that points to a page uniquely identifying that author, such as a bio page or social profile. Multiple authors each get their own author field. A byline a human can read tells Google nothing on its own; author markup with sameAs is how you connect that byline to a real, disambiguated identity that E-E-A-T can reward.
- Examines:
- Google's official Article structured data documentation — the author property, the sameAs and url disambiguation guidance, and Person-versus-Organization typing.
- Brass-SEO draws on:
- The author.sameAs disambiguation guidance — cited when Brass-SEO explains how to make authorship machine-readable as part of an E-E-A-T strategy.
