Why More Credible Websites?
I have seen buzz around the topic of more credible websites and the Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. Those Guidelines introduce the topic of E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) that site owners should think about for their sites. The Search Quality Raters Guidelines from Google are worth looking over to see how they have introduced quality raters to the concepts of E-A-T.
The Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines do not talk about an E-A-T Score for a website or how to achieve a site for someone to show off a lot of Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.
But, I have shared the Stanford Credibility Guidelines with Clients since the early 2000s, and those are worth looking over carefully. They do help lead to more credible websites and make them more believable; because of that, I wanted to share them. They are short and easy to put in place. They are at Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility. Using them does result in more credible websites.
The guidelines used over 4,500 participants to test and gather. The guidelines are from B.J. Fogg, who was at Stanford around when Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin attended. If you want to get into more detailed work from B.J. Fogg, he wrote a book about Computers as Persuasive Technology, which was interesting, and has a paper online that is worth taking a look at. (It is much more complex than the Stanford Credibility Guidelines, which are pretty simple and easy to install.)
The paper from B.J. Fogg is: Persuasive Computers: Perspectives and Research Directions
Take a look at the Stanford Credibility Guidelines – I am glad that I came across them and shared them with website owners whose sites I optimized.
Hi Bill
It’s a good resource – thank you.
The “Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.” at #10 is somewhat ironic given the formatting is all over the place!
🙂
Hi Bill … The “Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility” is like finding the “missing link”. Thank you for sharing. I’ve been looking for something like this! Best wishes, Richard
thanks for sharing, bill!
this is a perfect source to help out & educate especially those who don’t have their primary expertise & business in daily website design/optimization and are surely overwhelmed by Google*s quality guidelines.
Bill, really insightful post. E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) have been in discussion for long. Thanks for sharing the Search Quality Evaluator guidelines.
Thanks for sharing the Stanford guidelines Bill !
I need to do more content update.
Thank you so much Bill, I will try the guidelines and see if it works on a SEO project I am undertaking in my internship.