The Ultimate Guide to E-E-A-T in 2023 (+ Free Checklist!)

The Ultimate Guide to E-E-A-T in 2023 (+ Free Checklist!)

EEAT – Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness – has become a central pillar of website success in 2023. 

This hunger-inducing acronym represents Google’s approach to determining how reliable a particular website is. 

The more reliable Google thinks your website and content are, the easier it’ll be to rank high in the search results. 

(To read Google’s EEAT guidelines firsthand, you can jump to page 26 of their Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.)

Unfortunately, Google’s EEAT guidelines are a bit vague, and they don’t provide much actionable advice about how the average website owner can alter their site to meet their expectations. 

Enter Kyle Roof – the SEO industry’s leading expert on cracking Google’s EEAT code. 

Kyle has recently been interviewed on a series of podcasts to discuss the latest changes to EEAT. 

In these podcasts, he provides an awesome overview of what Google is looking for from website owners. 

However, much of what he discusses is theoretical – he doesn’t provide many in-depth tips or step-by-step instructions on how to implement these critical EEAT improvements. 

To fill that void, I’ve picked up where Kyle left off and written this complete guide to EEAT in 2023. 

I’ve included every single tidbit Kyle discusses on these podcasts – as well as additional research from other sources and my own personal experience – and provided actionable, in-depth, step-by-step advice on how to implement EEAT best practices on your website. 

Before we get started, make sure you download our complete EEAT checklist!

Download your free printable 2023 EEAT Checklist now. 

Alright, let’s dive in. 

A Necessary Shift in Perspective

Before I get into the nitty-gritty details, I want to briefly discuss a necessary shift in perspective that I feel many website owners need to embrace. 

In Google’s eyes, you’re not just “running a website.”

You’re running a business. And that’s how you should look at this.  

You’re earning money through ads, affiliate marketing, and potentially other methods. Because money is involved, you need to look as legitimate as possible. 

You can’t hide behind anonymity anymore. You need to put in the work to show Google this is a legitimate business and that a real person is responsible for the website and the content. 

You also shouldn’t think of EEAT as an “all-or-nothing” approach. It’s about ticking off as many EEAT boxes as possible to improve your standing in Google’s eyes. 

With that, let’s discuss some actionable ways you can implement the first “E” – Experience – on your website. 

Experience

According to Google, experience is “the extent to which the content creator has the necessary first-hand or life experience for the topic”

It’s essentially referring to the time you’ve put into learning about the topic and the personal experience you’ve developed as you’ve done so. 

So, how do you prove to the Google bot that you have experience?

Kyle believes Google is looking for specific wording and phrases to identify experience. It wants to see that you’re phrasing things in a way that shows you have personal experience with what you’re talking about. 

By changing up how you’re writing, you can boost Google’s perception of your site’s experience without having to spend years building real experience in your niche. 

Here are a few ways you can do this:

Include Terms That Reference Length of Time and Personal Experience

This is applicable to your About pages and Author bios. 

Even if you don’t have much experience in your niche, you can still say things like, “I’ve been in love with skiing for over 30 years. In 1987, I went to Lake Tahoe with my parents, and I’ll never forget flying down the mountains on my brand-new skis.”

Even if that Lake Tahoe trip was the only time you ever went skiing, it’s still a truthful statement. And it adds the time-referencing phrases – “over 30 years” / “In 1987” – that the Google bot is looking for. 

Use First-Person and Explain How You Feel About The Topic

Use “I” to explain things in a way that shows you have personal experience with the topic. 

Here are a few examples:

No Evidence of Experience Evidence of Experience
“Cedar is the best wood for this project.” “I think cedar is the best wood for building a dresser.”
“This bike is really heavy.” “When I picked up the bike, I felt it was heavy and hard to carry.”
“This chair is very affordable.” “After comparing the cost to the competition, I feel this chair is very affordable.”

Of course, if you don’t have the personal experience these phrases indicate, it’s understandable that you might not want to include these types of phrases. 

If you’re concerned about that and want to put forward an honest representation of your experience, I would still suggest using these phrases where you can. Many such phrases are valid and honest even if you haven’t personally experienced what the article is discussing. 

For example, the first and third examples in the above table would be valid even if you’ve only done internet research on the topic. You can think that cedar is the best wood for building a dresser without actually having built a dresser. 

Expertise

According to Google, Expertise is: “The extent to which the content creator has the necessary knowledge or skill for the topic.”

Here’s the kicker, though: with the exception of YMYL pages, you don’t need to be an expert to rank. 

According to Kyle, all Google really cares about is that a real person is behind the content. 

Of course, listing certifications and degrees is helpful. But it’s not required.

Let’s dive into some specific actions you can take to boost your site’s Expertise. 

Create Author Bio Pages 

Each author on your website should have a page with their name, photo, and a few paragraphs listing relevant information about them. This information might include:

      • Their experience in the niche
      • Other websites or publications they’ve written for. 

You’ll want to write as much as possible about your (or your authors’) experience with and passion for the niche. If it feels salesy and boastful, that’s a good thing. (This will help establish trust with your audience as well.)

It also helps to publish pictures and videos of you participating in your niche. 

Have a horse website? Add a picture of you on a horse! 

Even if you don’t participate with your niche at all, you should – if possible – get a few pictures of you interacting with your niche in some capacity. 

Pro-tip: Make sure you link to the author bio page from the About the team page (and vice-versa). 

Use Person Schema

Schema is a special type of HTML code that makes it easy for search engines to detect certain things about your content. 

When setting up your Author Bio pages, you’ll want to implement person schema so you can feed the Google bot valuable EEAT-boosting information. 

Here’s some of the information person schema lets you give to the Google bot:

      • Name
      • Short bio (Include alumni information if possible)
      • Email address
      • Physical address
      • Gender
      • Job title
      • SameAs links (LinkedIn page, other social media profiles, and other related websites).  

Some themes already have person schema built-in, while others will require you to use an SEO plugin like RankMath or AIOSEO to implement it on a specific page. 

Check your theme’s documentation (or just Google your theme’s name + “person schema”) to see if you’ll need to use one of these plugins to implement person schema. 

If you want to make things super easy, you can use the Schema Pro plugin to implement all types of schema markup in just a few clicks. 

It's not cheap at $67 per year, but it might be worth it if you don't want to work through the extra complexities involved in the free tools. 

Note: Listing your social profiles is about establishing you’re a real human, not that you’re an expert. 

Use Article Schema

Article schema makes it easier for Google to understand essential information about your articles, including:

      • Article title
      • Date the article was published
      • Featured image
      • Meta description
      • Link to author’s bio

Again, your theme may include this already. If it doesn’t, you’ll need a plugin like RankMath or AIOSEO.

Leverage User-Generated Content (UGC)

Google loves user-generated content. 

They mention in multiple documents that UGC can help improve their evaluation of a given page (and help you perform better in the SERP). 

In the context of blogs, utilizing the power of UGC means allowing comments from your readers. 

Their thinking is that a “go-to source” for information in a given niche would likely have comments from readers asking for advice and clarification. 

While many SEO professionals recommend disabling comments – after all, it takes work to moderate and respond to them – Google encourages you to enable them. 

Over time, the accumulation of comments from interested readers –  and your responses to those comments – can add valuable insights that weren’t included in the original article. 

Not only does this add value to the article, but it allows you to passively “update” your posts with new content as new comments are added. 

It also creates a “moat” around your content that is difficult for your competition to cross. 

Competitors who want to compete with you for a given search query will have a harder time outranking you if you have dozens of comments from readers sharing additional information and asking questions that you didn’t cover in the initial article. 

If you compare two articles of similar length and content coverage – but one has 2,000 additional words of comments from readers – Google will view the article with comments more favorably. 

Pro-tip: You can respond to comments with SEO-optimized responses to help you improve your rank for the target search query and rank for additional queries. 

Adding a Comments Section to Your Posts

WordPress has built-in comment functionality, and many themes come with a custom comments section.

However, if you’re not happy with the WordPress comments or the functionality included in your theme – third-party plugins can easily insert comments sections that Google can read. 

Here are a few free options:

Note: Kyle mentions that you shouldn’t use comments plugins that use Javascript — AKA all of the plugins listed above — as it can make it harder for the Google bot to crawl the comments. 

However, I asked technical-wunderkind Josh Koop of WhiteHatBlogging.com about this, and he said it really shouldn’t make a difference because Google always crawls your site twice – once for HTML and once for Javascript. 

Given how cool some of these plugins are, I’d personally take the risk and use one of them over the vanilla WordPress comments. But it’s up to you!

Additional Expertise Insights

Here are a couple extra tidbits I’d like to share about the Expertise category:

      • Google does not make value judgements about expertise. A degree from Harvard is viewed the same as a degree from your local community college. Similarly, they view a doctor from America as equivalent to a doctor from another country. 
      • Some YMYL info and advice must come from an expert. One example given in the search rater guidelines is accounting advice. 

Authoritativeness

According to Google, authoritativeness is “the extent to which the content creator or the website is known as a go-to source for the topic.”

However, according to Kyle, you don’t need to be an expert to check off the Authoritativeness boxes. 

What matters is how thoroughly you’ve covered the topic. And the best way to do that is by building topical authority. 

Build Topical Authority

To gauge your site’s topical authority, Google looks at how thoroughly you’ve covered the topic on your website. 

To be clear, I’m not talking about writing an extremely comprehensive article about a particular topic. 

I’m talking about how thoroughly your site as a whole covers that topic. 

Here's an example...

Let’s say you have a website about skis and want to target the sub-niche of cleaning your skis.

You could write an amazing 10,000-word mega-post on how to clean your skis.

But it’ll be hard to rank that article if it’s the only article about cleaning skis on your website!

To show Google that you are an authority on this topic, you should publish content about every corner of the “cleaning skis” sub-niche. 

This might include:

      • Types of ski cleaners (liquid, foam, wax, etc.)
      • Cleaning equipment (brushes, cloths, scrapers, etc.)
      • Proper cleaning technique (removing dirt and debris, cleaning edges and base, drying skis)
      • Considerations for different types of skis (e.g. powder skis, racing skis)

In each sub-category within the “cleaning skis” sub-niche, you might write several articles that cover all important aspects of the sub-category.

This is what Google wants to see in 2023. Simply cherry-picking low-competition search results isn’t going to cut it moving forward. 

Trustworthiness

According to Google, “Trust is the most important member of the E-E-A-T family because untrustworthy pages have low E-E-A-T no matter how Experienced, Expert, or Authoritative they may seem.”

For example, a well-known banking expert could create a page that promotes a financial scam. This page would have extremely low EEAT even though the author is an expert in the topic. 

The goal in this phase is to prove you’re a real business. You need to show Google that a real person is responsible for this website and its content. 

Get a Unique Business Address 

Getting a unique business address is crucial for proving to Google that your website represents a legitimate business venture. 

The key word here is unique. Kyle made it clear that you don’t want to share an address with any other businesses. 

Note: If you’re targeting a U.S. audience, you’ll want a U.S. address. If you're targeting a different audience, get an address in that country. 

(Most websites target a U.S. audience, so these explanations will focus on that. The advice is similar for other countries, though.)

The easiest solution to the address problem –  at least for those who live in the United States – is to use your home address. 

However, many people understandably don’t want to publish their home address for hundreds of thousands of strangers to read. 

If you don’t want to use your home address – or you don’t live in the U.S. – the next best thing is to get a virtual mailbox address. 

These services provide you with a real address you can use on your website. They’ll also scan any mail you receive and send it to you digitally. 

You’ll want to be careful when selecting a service, as not all of them offer unique suite numbers that differentiate you from the other people using this service. 

I did some research and found a couple of services that offer a unique suite number:

You don’t need anything fancy here. As long as you get an address with a unique suite number, you’re good to go. 

Note: Anyone signing up for a virtual address in the U.S. must sign USPS Form 1583. 

If you’re a U.S. resident, you can simply fill this out yourself. 

However, if you’re from outside the U.S., you’ll need a notary to sign the form for you. You can easily do this through an online service like OnlineNotary.net. 

Once you have your address, you should put it in the footer of your website and on your Contact and About pages. 

Get a Unique Phone Number

In addition to a unique address, you’ll also want a unique phone number. 

It’s important that this phone number matches the location of your business address. Google might not like it if your business address is in Chicago and you’re using a Seattle phone number. 

If you're in the United States, The easiest way to get one is through Google Voice. It's free, and all you’ll need is an existing phone number to link it to.

You can also set it up so that all phone calls are automatically routed to the Google Voice voicemail box. 

This lets you review any calls that come in at your leisure and decide which are worth responding to.  

Setting up the number is very straightforward, so I won’t explain how to do that here. 

However, I will explain how to ensure calls aren’t forwarded to your primary number: 

  1. 1. Go to Google Voice settings. 
  2. 2. Go to the “Incoming calls” section. 
  3. 3. Disable “Web.”
  4. 4. Disable “Call Forwarding”

If you're not in the United States, you can use a service like Sonetel to claim a number that matches your business address. 

Once you’ve done this, you can add your new phone number to your website footer and the Contact and About pages. 

Show Your Face

It’s important that a real face belonging to a real person is clearly shown to be responsible for everything on the website. 

Kyle gave the example of the Dr. Axe website, which got annihilated a few years ago in a Google update.

While Dr. Axe has legitimate certifications, there was no About info or pictures of him on the site. Because Google couldn’t verify who was responsible for the site, they decided they couldn’t trust it and stopped ranking most of the content. 

To cover your bases, you should include multiple photos of yourself (or whoever is representing the site) – at least one on the About page and a separate photo for the Author profile. 

Create Multiple Company Email Addresses

Generic contact forms aren’t enough to make Google happy. To satisfy their requirements, you will need to create email addresses for the various “departments” in your company. 

I know that most of you only need a single contact email. However, it doesn’t hurt to pretend you have a sprawling company with different departments and create an email address for each one. 

Here are a few email addresses you can create:

Most of these addreses will never be contacted by anyone. However, it’ll make the Google bot like you more, which is all that really matters. 

You should be able to create all of these email addresses for free within your web host. Every web host I’ve been with has offered that. If not, Google Workspace is a relatively affordable option. 

To keep things simple and ensure you don’t miss out on messages, you can forward all mail to the general contact email. 

Submit an XML Sitemap to Google

An XML sitemap is a file that helps Google (and other search engines) find all of the pages on your website. 

Having one is essential for ranking on Google. If Google can’t locate your pages, they can’t display them in the search results. 

WordPress does automatically generate an XML sitemap for you, so you don’t necessarily need a plugin for it. 

However, some technical SEO experts recommend using an XML sitemap from a third-party plugin, as the WordPress plugin is rather basic and might result in Google not crawling every page. 

General-purpose SEO plugins like RankMath and AIOSEO can do this for you.

You can also use the XML Sitemaps plugin if you don’t want to use a general-purpose option. 

Once you’ve got your sitemap generated, you can submit it to Google through the following process:

  1. 1. Grab the URL of your sitemap. It should be easily accessible in your sitemap plugin. If you’re using the WordPress sitemap, you can simply use “sitemap.xml”
  2. 2. Go to Google Search Console. 
  3. 3. Select your website. 
  4. 4. Go to “Sitemaps” on the left-hand sidebar. 
  5. 5. Remove any outdated sitemaps that may already be there. 
  6. 6. Enter the URL of your new sitemap. 

Publish an HTML Sitemap

An HTML sitemap is essentially a human-friendly form of XML sitemap. 

In case there are issues with Google accessing your XML sitemap, publishing an HTML sitemap provides a failsafe that ensures Google can access all of your pages. 

There are a few plugins that will instantly create an HTML sitemap for you:

Once the page has been generated, you should embed it in your site’s footer. This will make it very easy for Google to access it and crawl all of your pages. 

Ensure GDPR Compliance

GDPR compliance is important if your website reaches European users (which is pretty much every website). 

For a complete guide on making your site GDPR-compliant, I recommend reading this GoDaddy article on Practical steps for Website GDPR compliance.

To keep things simple, I’ll list the two most important steps here:

      • Make sure your privacy policy includes GDPR-compliant language. To ensure you aren’t missing anything, I recommend using a free privacy policy generator like Termly.
      • Display a GDPR cookie notification pop-up. The GDPR Cookie Compliance plugin will do this for you automatically. 

Add an “About the Company” Page

The “About the company” page can have information about how your company got started, your mission, and similar high-minded concepts. 

Don’t worry… you don’t have to publish a haughty essay about how you want to change the world with your website.

This can simply be a few paragraphs about why you created your site and how you want to help people learn more about your niche. 

Add an “About the Team” Page

The “About the Team” page is where you’ll put all of the humans who work with you.

Include names, photos, titles, and links to each person’s individual bio page. 

You should make this page even if you’re the only person on your team. 

Add a Privacy Policy

If you don’t have a privacy policy on your site yet, it’s an absolute must-have.  

Fortunately, it’s very easy to create. Termly will quickly generate a custom privacy policy that fits your site’s exact specifications. 

Add a Terms and Conditions Page

A Terms and Conditions page is just as important as a privacy policy. Google typically won’t even approve your site for ads if you don’t have either of these pages. 

Again, you can use Termly to generate one for free. 

Add a Refund Policy (if applicable)

If you sell digital or physical products on your site, it’s important to have a page that explicitly explains your refund policy. 

Add a Copyright message

You should always have a Copyright message containing your company’s name, the copyright symbol (or the word “Copyright”), and the current year in the footer. 

Example: © 2023 | We Write Blog Posts LLC 

Enable SSL Certificate

If you haven’t enabled your SSL certificate, you need to do that pronto. 

Any decent web host will offer SSL certificates for free. If you need help setting it up, contact your host’s support team. 

Check for 404 errors

Google doesn’t like links that don’t go anywhere. If any pages on your site are linking to another page on your site that no longer exists – thereby generating a 404 error – you should find those and fix them. 

Here are a few plugins that can help you find them:

Check for broken external links

Google hates when you link out to nonexistent pages on other websites just as much as they hate linking to nonexistent pages on your own site. 

The Broken Link Checker plugin is an easy way to find broken external links. This works for 404 errors as well.

Additional Insights

Before I end this post, I want to share a few extra insights I learned that didn’t fit into any of the above sections. 

      • Publishing 1,000 articles in a single day is much better than publishing 1 article per day for 1,000 days. It gives Google more time to index and understand your content, and you'll grow your site much faster. 
      • If you review products, you should make an editorial guidelines page that explains how you perform your product reviews and choose your recommendations. A great example is the Product Research Methodology page from SleepFoundation.org. 
      • Kyle believes publishing AI content without substantial human editing will be the equivalent of publishing duplicate content. If websites all generate the same articles with ChatGPT, Google will recognize that and penalize all sites publishing that content. 
      • Kyle believes that if you are going to use AI to create content, you should use it to generate a rough outline and then fill in the blanks with human-written content. Don’t use it to generate the bulk of an article, as you’re running the risk of adding inaccurate information and getting hit for duplicate content.

Conclusion

To summarize, here are the strategies you can use to boost your site’s EEAT:

      • Experience
          • Include terms that reference length of time and personal experience. 
          • Use first-person and explain how you feel about the topic. 
      • Expertise
          • Create Author bio pages. 
          • Use person schema. 
          • Use article schema. 
          • Enable (and respond to) comments on your blog. 
      • Authoritativeness
          • Build topical authority by creating content clusters. 
      • Trustworthiness
          • Get a unique business address. 
          • Get a unique phone number. 
          • Show your face on your site. 
          • Create multiple company email addresses. 
          • Submit an XML sitemap to Google. 
          • Publish an HTML sitemap. 
          • Ensure GDPR compliance. 
          • Create an About the Company page. 
          • Create an About the Team page. 
          • Add a privacy policy. 
          • Add a terms and conditions page. 
          • Add a refund policy (if applicable). 
          • Add a copyright message. 
          • Enable an SSL certificate. 
          • Check for 404 errors. 
          • Check for broken external links. 

And if you haven't already, remember to get your free EEAT checklist!

Download your free 2023 EEAT Checklist now. 

Get started today for as little as 5.5 cents per word.


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by Steve Rajeckas

How (And Why) We're Protecting You From AI Content

How (And Why) We're Protecting You From AI Content

At We Write Blog Posts, we’re dedicated to providing a high level of content quality — no matter the challenge.

The recent release of ChatGPT represented the tallest hurdle yet in that pursuit.

We’re committed to producing 100% human-written content, and we’ve been discussing how to ensure that since ChatGPT was released.

While we have a very high level of trust in our writers — many of whom have been with us for a few years now — we appreciate the need for a process to verify that content isn't being created with the use of AI. 

Fortunately, we’ve come up with a solution that involves a really useful tool and careful analysis of how writers add content to their documents.

But before I get to that, I want to briefly explain why simply using one of the AI detection tools that have cropped up recently isn’t the magic bullet it seems to be.

The Hard Truth: AI Detection Tools Suck

Our initial thought when deciding how to deal with AI content was to use one of the AI detection tools that have cropped up recently.

However, our internal tests with tools that supposedly detect AI content have been discouraging, to say the least.

We found that each tool we tried — including Originality.ai, CopyLeaks, Writer.com, and ChatGPT’s AI detector — was woefully inadequate.

They all throw a ton of false positives, and they’re pretty easy to fool by changing the wording of the AI output. 

Even OpenAI — the creator of ChatGPT — says their AI detector is only right 26% of the time.

They simply aren’t good enough to be trusted.

Therefore, simply telling you, “We’re running all of our articles through an AI detector tool,” and calling it a day would have been a terrible way to approach this.

A Different Approach

Because the AI detection tools suck, our focus shifted from using those tools to evaluating how articles were created by the writers.

Because we use Google Docs to create our content, we started experimenting with looking through Google Docs version histories to check for large sections of text added within an abnormally small timeframe.

If a writer is writing articles normally — by performing proper research and typing the article word-by-word — the Google Docs version history shouldn’t show whole paragraphs or sections added in a single moment (which is what it would show if they pasted in AI-generated text).

Makes sense, right? 

Well, it's good in theory, but it doesn't quite work.

The problem with this approach is that the Google Docs version history doesn’t provide enough detail. It only shows changes in batches that update every minute or so.

If someone is a fast typist, it could easily seem like they are pasting in entire paragraphs when they’re just typing efficiently. So simply viewing the version history wasn’t good enough.

Our Solution To The AI Problem

The recent release of a new tool handed us a gift-wrapped solution.

Originality created a Chrome plugin that allows you to view exactly how content written in a Google Doc was added.

It’s like the Google Docs version history tool on steroids.

While Google Docs merely shows a rough outline of edits made within a given period, this tool shows every single character that was added to and removed from the document — all the way from document creation to article completion.

It’s pretty incredible. Here’s a gif that shows how it works:

This is not from a client article. One of our writers runs a cleaning website, and they graciously allowed us to use their article as an example.

That’s not all it does, though.

It also provides a graph that displays the character addition trends over time.

This makes it extremely easy to identify when large sections of text are added in a short period.

For example, the graph for an article written normally will look something like this:

While the graph for an article created with AI might look something like this:

The above report is not from a client’s article. This is an example from when I was testing AI functionality when writing a post for one of my own websites.

Notice the vertical jumps in character count when large sections of text were pasted into the document.

While there are certainly instances where pasting in text is warranted — such as when you're directly quoting someone — there is no situation in which pasting 2,000+ characters at the same time is okay. 

We believe this tool offers the best way to detect and defend against AI usage when outsourcing, and we’ll be incorporating it into our workflow immediately.

How We’ll Use This Tool To Protect You

To make sure we use this tool to its full potential and continue to provide a high level of quality, here’s what we’ll be doing:

  • We will review the edit history of every article to check for signs of AI content.
  • We will require writers to write each post in a single Google Doc from start to finish. Writers who do not adhere to this requirement will be removed from our team.
  • We will continue to require writers to add sources to the sources list as they use them. This makes it easy for us to use this tool to identify where writers are getting their information as they add it to the sources list. (This also allows us to detect AI content even if a writer decides to manually type the AI content into the document rather than pasting it in.)
  • Our editors will continue to thoroughly read through articles to check for factual inaccuracies, statements that don’t fit into the context of the article, and other potential signs of AI usage.

Now that I’ve covered how we’ll protect you from AI content, I want to briefly explain why it’s important to avoid AI content in your articles.

Why It’s Important To Defend Against AI Usage

Many people have been concerned about Google detecting and penalizing content created with the help of AI.

Thankfully, Google recently clarified their stance on AI usage in content.

You can read their full statement here, but I can easily summarize it in one sentence:

As long as the content is good, Google doesn’t care how it was made.

If the Google algorithm detects traces of AI usage in your content, it will not automatically penalize your website.

However, despite this clarification, I want to make something clear:

Using AI to generate content is still very risky.

The problem lies in the abundance of incorrect information AI-generated content can contain.

I’ve been researching AI since ChatGPT was released — both in testing it myself and reading about others’ experiences with it.

By and large, the consensus is that it presents information very confidently, but that information is often wrong.

Here are a couple examples of incorrect content:

  • ChatGPT generated a recipe for bread that didn’t mention you need to let the bread rise. If you followed the recipe, you’d have been left with an inedible brick. (This link is to a post in the Project 24 community, so if you’re not a member, you won’t be able to view it.)
  • Google’s first tech demo of their Bard AI contained an inaccurate statement. It said the James Webb Space Telescope took the first picture of a planet outside our solar system. The first picture was actually taken by a telescope in Chile almost 20 years ago. (Google’s stock price dropped $100 billion after this incident.)

This is why we’ve implemented such stringent anti-AI measures.

The worst thing you can do on your blog is publish inaccurate information, and using AI makes it very difficult to verify that what you’re publishing is true.

Why We Write Blog Posts vs. ChatGPT: Why We’re The Better Choice

Despite the surface-level impressiveness of ChatGPT, it has deep-seated flaws and can’t be trusted to provide accurate information.

A carefully designed content creation process manned by professional writers and editors remains the ideal way to create original, high-quality blog posts.

We’ve taken great care to develop such a process here at We Write Blog Posts. Here are a few measures we take to maintain a high level of quality control.

  • Our writers are trained to identify and use information from authoritative sources that can be trusted to provide accurate information.
  • We have a strict editorial process where each is closely reviewed by multiple experienced editors. Each article we submit comes with a list of the sources the writer used — our editors use this list to verify that all information comes from a trustworthy source.
  • Our editors are trained to examine sources and identify inaccurate information.

Here’s the bottom line: we are fully committed to providing the same original, high-quality content we always have.

The proliferation of AI tools like ChatGPT does not change our mission, and we are confident that the processes we’ve implemented will prevent AI usage in our content.

 

Before I finish this post, I want to add a quick addendum about the documents we submit to you.

We submit all content to you on a We Write Blog Posts company Google account rather than submitting the writer’s version of the document.

This is to ensure your content remains accessible even if the writer decides to close their Google account or delete their version of the document.

Because of this, if you use the Originality plugin to analyze one of our articles, you’ll see that all of the content was pasted in at once.

This does not mean AI was used to create the article — it’s merely evidence of our editing team transferring the writer’s content to a company-hosted document.

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by Steve Rajeckas

The Ultimate Guide to Eradicating Spun Content

The Ultimate Guide to Eradicating Spun Content

Spinning is a huge problem in the content creation industry. 

But the truth is that sometimes writers can’t help but spin their content. 

And nobody likes to talk about it… especially content agencies. 

If you — or the writing agency you’re outsourcing with — don’t check their work carefully, you could end up with a website full of spun articles waiting to get hit by a Google update. 

And you’d have absolutely no idea. 

As the owner of a high-volume content service, I feel I'm in the perfect position to provide some guidance and perspective on this taboo topic. 

Here's what I’ll be sharing with you today: 

  • • What truly constitutes "spun content."
  • • The damage spun content can do to your website (with a real-life example). 
  • • The ins and outs of our anti-spin process (so you can replicate it and make sure you’re not unwittingly buying spun content from other sources). 
  • • The best spin checking tool available (based on our internal data). 

What Is Spun Content?

Before we start this discussion, it's best that I quickly go over the telltale signs of spun content:

  • • Similar sentence structure with word choice slightly altered. 
  • • Similar flow of ideas from sentence to sentence. 
  • • Similar subheading structure throughout the entire article. 
  • • Similar information presented in the same order and/or format. 

While some minor similarities between articles about similar topics are to be expected — after all, the point of research is to use information from other sources — you shouldn’t see blatantly obvious similarities between multiple sentences, paragraphs, or subheadings. 

The writer should be taking any information they use and synthesizing it into a fresh article with a unique, value-adding take on the topic. They should not be copying another person’s sentences and merely rearranging the structure and vocabulary. 

The Dangers of Spun Content

Spun content can hurt your site in a few different ways. 

Sitewide Google Penalty

If your site has a surplus of spun content on it, you’re at risk of getting whacked by a Google update. 

Don’t believe me? Here’s what Google has to say about it in their Spam Policies documentation:

“Some site owners base their sites around content taken ("scraped") from other, often more reputable sites. Scraped content, even from high quality sources, without additional useful services or content provided by your site may not provide added value to users.”

And one example they give of “scraped content” is...

“Sites that copy content from other sites, modify it only slightly (for example, by substituting synonyms or using automated techniques), and republish it.”

So there you have it. Google is telling you that spun content is a problem and can result in a hit to your traffic. 

Now, no one knows to what extent an article has to be spun — or what percentage of your published articles need to contain spun content — for Google to annihilate your site and destroy years of painstaking effort.  

However, a sitewide Google penalty isn’t the only way spun content can hurt you. 

Individual Article Ranking Issues

Google's algorithm may also take an article’s similarity to other published articles into account when deciding where to rank it.

Individual articles with spun sections may not rank well even if your site as a whole has not been penalized. This is because spun content doesn't add any new value or unique perspective, and Google has no reason to rank your article over the other articles that are already providing the same exact information. 

If a substantial number of articles contain elements of spinning, you might find your traffic is significantly stunted. 

It Damages Your Authority

Spun content can also hurt you from an authority standpoint.

If you’re trying to position yourself as a leading expert in your niche, it’s not a great look if your audience (or other leaders in the niche) discovers you're copying content from other industry experts. 

Other authorities in your niche might turn down valuable collaboration opportunities, which can dampen your potential reach and cause you to lose out on valuable backlinks.

You can also lose the trust of your audience, which may have serious consequences for monetization. If you're going to recommend or sell products to your audience, it's imperative that they trust your opinion. If they don't trust you, they're not going to buy your products, and if they're not going to buy your products, you're not going to make money. 

How To Detect Spun Content

In my experience, the only way you can effectively detect spinning is to use a multi-step process that includes using a top-notch spin detection tool and manual analysis from a trained editor. 

You need both components to feel truly confident in your spin detection capabilities. Leaving out either one leaves you vulnerable to missing something. 

Let me explain how you can combine these strategies to create a formidable anti-spin system. 

Step 1: Use Spin Checking Software

Your biggest allies in the fight against spinning are spin-detecting software tools. 

There are so many potential sources a writer could choose to spin from. Going one by one and manually comparing your article to the countless related articles out there is a time-consuming and ultimately fruitless task. 

To find potential issues quickly, you need the help of software tools that can scan billions of web pages in a few seconds. 

In my 4+ years of experience writing blog content, I've found 5 popular tools that claim to detect plagiarism and spun content:

To determine which tool is the best for detecting spun content, I ran an experiment. Let's look at the results below. 

Experiment Results

In taking on this experiment, I wanted to quantify two things to help us with our approach to spinning: 

  • • How much spun content we were detecting and rewriting.
  • • How effective each tool is at detecting spun content.  

Determining Prevalence of Spun Content

Fortunately, the first task was easy. 

We keep track of every single piece of spun content we detect. Our data shows that about 4% of all articles that come through our editing queue are at least partially spun. 

I also randomly selected 100 unedited articles, ran them through all 5 tools, and manually analyzed any relevant triggers that appeared. 

My findings matched our internal data pretty exactly. Out of 100 random unedited articles, I found 4 with clear signs of spinning. 

Tool Efficacy Test

To evaluate tool efficacy, I found 30 articles from the last year that we’ve confirmed to be spun and analyzed how effective each tool was at detecting the spun content. 

Here are the results:

  • • CopyLeaks: Detected 27/30 spun articles.
  • •  Quetext: Detected 13/30 spun articles.
  • •  Copyscape: Detected 8/30 spun articles.
  • •  Grammarly Premium: Detected 4/30 spun articles.
  • •  Writer.com: Detected 3/30 spun articles.

And here’s something pretty interesting: 50% of these were only detected by one tool (CopyLeaks):

  • • 13/30 were only detected by CopyLeaks.
  • • 1/30 was only detected by Quetext.
  • • 1/30 was only detected by Grammarly Premium.

A graph showing instances where only 1 tool detected the spun content.

For extra context, here’s a screenshot of the spreadsheet I was working in. 

  • • Green = Tool detected the spun content.
  • • Orange = Tool did not detect the spun content.
  • • Cyan = Tool was the only tool to detect the spun content. 

The results of this experiment are the reason we've decided to use CopyLeaks as our plagiarism and spin detection software tool. 

The other tools clearly show some inaccuracy, and any triggers they did pick up were almost always picked up by CopyLeaks as well. 

However, even running your articles through the best spin detection tool out there isn’t enough. 

You also need to manually analyze the results and determine if the triggers meet the following criteria:

  • • They are relevant to your article. 
  • • They are actually indicative of spinning. 

Dealing with False Positives

Before moving on to the manual analysis, I want to discuss one of the most frustrating things I’ve found with some of these tools: they love to give you false positives. 

Two tools in particular — Grammarly Premium and Quetext — are notorious for showing triggers that have absolutely nothing to do with your article. 

And when they do provide a relevant trigger, that trigger is often coincidental, and it’s clear the writer didn’t actually reference the article that threw the trigger when they were writing. 

Note: When I say “relevant trigger”, I’m referring to a trigger from an article that is about a similar topic. 

For example, if I were running an article titled “Why Do Goats Faint?” through Grammarly Premium, I might get the following triggers:

  1. 1. Trigger from an article about car repair. 
  2. 2. Trigger from an article about goat health. 
  3. 3. Trigger from an article about cats. 

In this instance, triggers #1 and #3 are irrelevant because the source articles are about completely different topics. Any similarities are purely coincidental and an example of the plagiarism tool being over-sensitive. 

However, trigger #2 is relevant because it’s about the same overarching topic (goats). This would require a manual comparison between the two articles to determine if the trigger is coincidental, or if there are clear signs of spinning. 

Analyzing relevant triggers to determine whether they’re spun or not is important. You don’t want to waste a perfectly good article just because a tool says there’s a problem. 

In fact, in editing tens of thousands of articles, our team has found that the vast majority of relevant triggers are not evidence of spun content. 

They’re simply evidence of the tools being oversensitive and recognizing that articles about similar topics are inevitably going to contain some of the same words. 

However, within that high percentage of false positives, you may find a few instances of clearcut spinning, which is why it's important to investigate every relevant trigger you find. 

Now that we’ve talked about using tools to identify potential problems, let's discuss how you can analyze each trigger and determine if the content is spun. 

Step 2: Analyze Relevant Triggers 

If the tools find any relevant triggers, the next step is to compare your article with the article that threw the trigger. 

To make the comparison easy, you should mark up your Google Doc with comments that highlight the trigger documents and link to the source. 

If you’re using a tool that shows you the specific sentences in the trigger article that caused the trigger to appear — CopyLeaks does this — then you can make it even easier by adding a link directly to the sentence in question. 

Here’s how you can do it:

  1. 1. Go to the web page that caused the trigger. 
  2. 2. Find the sentence(s) that caused the trigger. 
  3. 3. Highlight the sentence(s) with your mouse. 
  4. 4. Right-click the highlighted text and select “Copy link to highlight.”
  5. 5. Go back to your Google Doc and highlight the text you want to compare. 
  6. 6. Add a comment and paste the link in there. 

Now you can easily navigate back and forth between the two articles and quickly analyze them. (Or have a member of your team do it.)  

If there are any signs of spinning, they should be easy to detect. 

Final Thoughts 

Spinning is a common problem when outsourcing, and allowing spun content to reach your website can cause big problems if Google decides to take action. 

If you’re only going to use a tool for spin detection, make it CopyLeaks. It’s not perfect, but it’s far better than the other tools out there. 

And if you want to breathe easy and avoid worrying about any of this altogether, consider getting your SEO blog content from a service that actually takes spinning seriously. 

(Based on our experiment data, any service that is running your content through Copyscape or Grammarly isn't getting the most in-depth spin detection possible.)

Here's the bottom line: Google is upping their game, which means website owners — and content services — need to follow suit. If you don't take steps to ensure you're publishing original content, you may pay a big price for it down the road. 

Outsourcing with We Write Blog Posts saves you time and money you’d otherwise be spending checking your outsourced content for spinning. 

It also gives you the peace of mind that Google won't smite your site whenever they update their spam detection algorithm. 

Our spin defense system is far from the only thing we do to add value to your content, but it is an important protection that — to my knowledge — no other service is currently offering. 

If you have any questions about how we can help you scale your website's growth at an affordable price, get in touch with us today.

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by Steve Rajeckas