Google is increasingly identifying individuals as content creators across various industries. This recognition is becoming more visible in Knowledge Panels, where subtitles such as “Content Creator (Medicine)” or “Content Creator (Travel)” are appearing. These developments signal a significant change in Google’s emphasis on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) and its application to content creators.
Why Google is Focusing on Content Creators
Google’s recent updates show a clear focus on identifying and associating authoritative individuals with the content they produce. This development highlights the importance of understanding how SEO experts can adapt and optimize for this new landscape.
Key Events Highlighting This Trend
Several events in 2023 and 2024 underline Google’s ongoing interest in identifying content creators:
- Killer Whale Knowledge Graph Update (July 2023): This update significantly expanded the number of person entities recognized by Google.
- E-E-A-T Update (March 2024): Reinforced the importance of connecting people to their content.
- Google Leak (May 2024): Confirmed Google’s association of people with their articles and profile pages, further solidifying the connection between creators and their online content.
What This Means for SEO and E-E-A-T
Google’s recognition of content creators plays a crucial role in E-E-A-T, as it enables the search engine to link content with authoritative individuals. This development changes the way SEO professionals must approach content optimization, with a new emphasis on building person-to-content relationships.
To succeed in this environment, it’s essential to not only optimize the content itself but also to optimize the content creator and website publisher entities.
How to Optimize Content Creators for SEO
1. Understandability
It’s essential to create clear relationships between content creators and the reference pages that Google uses for verification. Ideal pages include:
- The creator’s personal website
- The “About” page on the employer’s website
- Social media profiles
- Trusted third-party sources (e.g., Crunchbase, Wikidata)
2. Credibility
Establish connections between content creators and their relevant content. This includes:
- Articles they’ve written
- Videos or podcasts they’ve been featured in
- Interviews they’ve given or been mentioned in
- Articles written about them
3. Deliverability
Expand the creator’s digital presence by producing new content and ensuring it is:
- Clear
- Consistent
- Relevant
- Factually accurate
Use a hub-and-spoke model, with the creator’s personal website as the hub, linking all relevant content across the web. This helps Google and AI systems make connections and strengthen the content creator’s authority.
How to Check If Google Recognizes a Content Creator
To verify if Google recognizes a content creator, you can search for one of their articles. Click the three vertical dots next to the result in the SERPs. If Google shows the author’s name and description, this confirms that Google has established a relationship between the author and the content.
Why Continuous Optimization is Essential
The relationships between person entities and URLs are not static. Google’s algorithms are constantly updating, sometimes recalibrating entities or even deleting them. For example, during the Killer Whale update, the number of recognized person entities tripled in a single day, significantly impacting the SEO landscape.
Ongoing monitoring and maintenance of these relationships are essential, especially for newer or less-established person entities.
Building Topical Authority for Content Creators
Topical authority is a key element in SEO today. To build topical authority for content creators, it’s important to develop URL-to-entity relationships both for the topics and for the creators themselves. As this authority grows, Google may assign a subtitle such as “Content Creator (Topic),” further signaling the individual’s expertise in a specific field.
Future Outlook: AI Assistants and Knowledge Graphs
Search engines and AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Alexa, and Siri, are adopting similar strategies to Google in terms of identifying content creators and organizing content into Knowledge Graphs. This trend emphasizes the need for SEO professionals to stay current with the evolving digital landscape and focus on person-to-page relationships.
Conclusion: What Modern SEO Experts Should Do
To stay ahead in this evolving SEO landscape, it’s crucial to focus on building and maintaining the relationships between content creators and the web pages associated with them. This strategy not only improves search rankings but also enhances visibility in Knowledge Panels, AI Overviews, and other search features.
SEO professionals should apply this strategy to their clients’ content creators to ensure SERP visibility, topical authority, and improved rankings in Google’s ever-changing search ecosystem.