Definition
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust: the quality criteria Google’s raters apply, weighted heavily in money topics like gambling.
E-E-A-T is not a score and not a ranking factor. It is the vocabulary in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, used by human raters whose judgements train and evaluate the ranking systems rather than feeding into them directly. The influence is real but indirect, which is why it cannot be optimised like a tag.
How it works
The four terms narrow as they go. Experience asks whether the author has done the thing. Expertise asks whether they know the subject. Authoritativeness asks whether others treat the site as a reference. Trust — which the guidelines call the most important — asks whether the page can be relied on at all: who publishes it, how it makes money, whether it is accurate.
Gambling falls under what the guidelines call “Your Money or Your Life”, where the bar is deliberately higher because a bad page can cause real harm.
In practice the signals are mundane and verifiable: a named author with a traceable background, a real publisher behind the site, disclosed commercial relationships, dated and sourced claims, working contact details. None of them is a trick, and that is the design.
Why it matters in iGaming
The commercial model is the problem to solve. An affiliate site earns money from the operators it reviews, which is a transparent conflict of interest, and pretending otherwise damages trust rather than protecting it. Sites that disclose the arrangement plainly and still publish unfavourable assessments are the ones that read as credible.
The experience criterion is also unusually available here. Someone who has actually run a withdrawal, hit a verification wall, or tested a bonus condition can write things nobody could paraphrase from a competitor’s page — and that is exactly the difference the raters are asked to notice.
Example
Two review pages cover the same operator. One is unsigned, undated, uniformly positive. The other names its author, links a profile, states when the operator was tested, says the site earns commission, and lists two things the operator does badly. Nothing in the second page is a ranking technique; all of it is what the guidelines describe.
Common mistakes
- Treating it as a checklist. An author box over text written by someone who has never used the product adds a claim rather than credibility.
- Hiding the commercial relationship. Readers and raters both find it; disclosed, it is a fact, and undisclosed it is a reason to distrust everything else on the page.
- Publishing only positive assessments. A review section where nothing is ever criticised reads as advertising, because it is.