The test scenario

[Reddi2]

I have selected 29 pieces of content to move unchanged to the glossary on aufgesang.de between April and August 2024. The articles were all rated as relevant by Google in the past and were rewarded with top rankings before 2021, but have lost their top 10 positions over time.

The old URLs were redirected to the new ones via 301. For the internal linking of the glossary entries, we use WordPress plugins on both domains for automatic internal linking with the main keywords as anchor text. The only difference in the design of the glossary entries is that on aufgesang.de I am not named as the author and no author boxes are used. In theory, this should actually be a disadvantage, but the results show that, surprisingly, it has not turned out to be a disadvantage.

I monitor the visibility and ranking developments of the individual contents in several Sistrix dashboards.

I would like to mention that none of the currently hyped methods germany cell phone number list such as topical mapping, micro semantics, macro semantics or other complex approaches were used in the production of the content. Relevance optimization was carried out in the classic way using TF-IDF analyses and W-question research.

The test results
The domain aufgesang.de has increased its visibility by over 1400% since April. The old rankings that the content on sem-deutschland.de was able to achieve before 2021 have almost all been restored and in some cases even improved.





Looking at the current overall visibility of both domains together, there was an increase of about 250%, although it must be mentioned that August Core Update 2024 has partly led to a recovery at sem-deutschland.de.


Visibility of the two domains stacked

Conclusion
I have been working on the topic of entity and domain-specific quality assessment since 2013. Even before Google introduced EEAT into the Quality Rater Guidelines in 2015, I had the feeling that there are influential ranking factors that can be influenced primarily through digital brand building. With EEAT as a quality and brand concept, Google gave this feeling a name.

I would like to draw the following conclusions from this test:

The trustworthiness and authority of a page has a very big impact on rankings, not only for YMYL topics.
Author boxes do not play a major role.
Surprisingly, authorship does not seem to play a major role, but rather the source entity of the company or publisher itself.
EEAT depends primarily on brand-related macro factors at the domain and source entity level, rather than on the individual content itself. (see graphic)