The Medic update and E-A-T: expertise, authority and trust

Google confirmed the update on August 1 through its Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, describing it as a broad core update of the kind it releases several times a year. He added that there was "no fix" for pages that performed less well, and that the remedy was to focus on building great content so that, over time, pages might rise relative to others.

Analysis of winners and losers published over the following weeks by SEO tool vendors and consultants found a consistent pattern. Health, medicine, nutrition, fitness, finance, law and e-commerce categories saw the largest swings, with some sites losing 30 to 50 percent of organic traffic overnight and others gaining as much. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable surveyed more than 300 affected sites and found that around 40 percent were in the medical and health space, which gave the update its name.

Two weeks before the update, on July 20, Google published a revised version of its Search Quality Rater Guidelines. The revision expanded the sections on E-A-T, put new weight on the reputation of the content creator rather than only the website, and added language about the "beneficial purpose" of a page. The timing is not proof of a direct link, but it tells you what Google thinks quality looks like.

The rater guidelines describe the standard for a high-quality page in a YMYL category. Translated into a checklist for a business:

Expertise. Who wrote this, and are they qualified? For medical content, a clinician or someone with relevant formal training. For financial content, someone with professional credentials. For everyday topics, demonstrable experience counts: the guidelines explicitly recognize "everyday expertise" from people who have lived the subject.

Authoritativeness. Is the author, and the site, recognized by others as a source? Citations from reputable sites, mentions in the press, professional profiles, published work elsewhere, and references from the kind of institutions the subject involves.

Trustworthiness. Is the content accurate, sourced and current? Is it clear who runs the site, how to contact them, and what their policies are? Do reviews and third-party reputation support or contradict the site's claims?

The guidelines also ask raters to assess the main content for quality and effort, to look for a clear beneficial purpose, and to check whether ads or affiliate elements obscure or compromise the content.

Run this on the pages that lost the most traffic first, then across the site.

1. Author identity. Does every substantive page carry a named author with a biography stating relevant qualifications? Anonymous or "admin" bylines on advice content are the single most common gap we find.
2. Author reputation off-site. Search the author's name. If nothing comes up but your own site, there is nothing for Google or a rater to verify.
3. Review and oversight. For medical, legal and financial content, add an expert reviewer with credentials, a "medically reviewed by" or "reviewed by" line and a date. Mean it; a name on the page without actual review is a liability.
4. Sources. Claims should cite primary sources: studies, official guidance, regulators, standards bodies. Link to them.
5. Accuracy and currency. Outdated advice in a health or money context is a trust failure. Show a last-reviewed date and keep it honest.
6. About, contact and policy pages. Who runs the site, where they are, how to reach them, and for e-commerce, clear shipping, returns and refund terms. Raters are instructed to look for these.
7. Reputation. Read your own reviews on Google, the Better Business Bureau, Trustpilot and industry-specific review sites. The guidelines tell raters to research reputation, and consistent negative reviews are treated as strong evidence of a low-quality site.
8. Ads and affiliate density. Pages where the main content is hard to find under advertising, or where affiliate links are the obvious purpose, are rated down.
9. Thin and duplicative content. Hundreds of near-identical pages on variations of a condition or product can drag the whole site's perceived quality down. Consolidate.
10. Technical trust basics. HTTPS everywhere, no broken pages, a site that works on mobile. These are table stakes, not fixes for a core update, but failing them compounds the problem.

Google has indicated that broad core updates arrive every few months, and that sites which improve may see changes at the next one. That sets the rhythm.

Months one to two: fix the foundation. Add author bios and reviewer lines, build out about and contact pages, consolidate thin content, and add a last-reviewed process. Remove or rewrite content you cannot stand behind. On a large site, prioritize the pages that lost the most and the pages that earn the most.

Months two to four: raise the quality of the content that matters. For the top 20 to 50 pages by potential, have a qualified expert revise or rewrite them, add sources, add original material such as data, examples or clear decision guidance, and make the page answer the question better than the pages that now outrank it. Compare your page to the current top results honestly.

Months three to six: build reputation off the site. Get your experts published or quoted elsewhere, pursue mentions from the institutions and publications in your field, respond to reviews and fix the service problems behind the negative ones, and claim and complete professional profiles. This is the slowest part and the one most sites skip.

Throughout, keep the measurement simple: organic traffic and rankings for the affected page groups, tracked weekly, with annotations for the dates of known Google updates so that you can read the next core update correctly.

• Chase a technical fix. Disavowing links, changing the theme or adding schema markup to every page will not reverse a quality judgment. Structured data for authors and organizations is worth having, but it describes credibility rather than creating it.
• Invent credentials. Fake reviewer names and fabricated bios are easy to detect and turn a ranking problem into a reputational one.
• Delete everything that dropped. Some of it is fixable and valuable. Judge page by page.
• Publish more thin content to compensate. Volume is often what caused the problem.
• Panic at every fluctuation. Core updates produce weeks of movement. Decide on the plan and judge it at the next update.

We start with discovery: which page groups lost, what the top-ranking competitors now do differently, and an audit of authorship, sourcing, reputation and site trust signals. We then plan the sequence, from foundation fixes through content revision to reputation work, with the next expected core update as a milestone. Build covers author and review processes, rewritten and consolidated content, the about, contact and policy pages, and any technical cleanup. Then we improve, reading each subsequent update against the plan. Brand, growth, web and technology all come into it, because trust is a brand property that shows up in search, on the site and in what others say about you.

A representative engagement is the content program we ran for a business whose advice content had driven most of its organic traffic until a core update cut it sharply. We found hundreds of unsigned articles written for keywords rather than readers, no reviewer process and an about page that said almost nothing. We consolidated the library to a smaller set of substantial pieces, put named, credentialed authors and reviewers on each, added sourcing and review dates, rebuilt the trust pages, and started a program to get the company's experts cited by publications in its field. Traffic to the revised pages recovered in stages over the following updates, and the content the business now publishes is something it would be comfortable defending to a regulator or a journalist.