After having been bitten quite hard by Google’s August algorithm update, I’ve been on a mission to establish a bit more EAT related to my online presence in hopes of a recovery. If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about, EAT is a recent bit of buzz phraseology that has those of us with an interest in SEO pounding our forks at the dinner (i.e., revenue) table and hollering about the latest batch of secret ingredients in Google’s ranking algorithm sauce.
EAT in SEO parlance stands for “Expertise, Authority and Trust” and from all impressions, this seems to be a subjective measurement of a site’s credibility assigned by a human quality ranker at the Big G. And fundamentally this comes down to identifying people associated with sites, and establishing that those sites are built and run by bonafide credentialed humans and not Russian robots or other nefarious automatons. Google has a document that gives some vague hand-wavy instructions for its human raters to follow to find out more about a site’s pedigree, typically by looking off-site for items on the EAT menu.
I’ve been studying this menu for a while now, but one item off the appetizer list that I completely missed was setting up a personal profile on LinkedIn and getting a company page listed for DadsWorksheets.
So let me be candid here. I’m a terrific introvert. Where lately people run around denouncing the looming perils of social media addiction, I’m one of those dungeon dwellers whose arm need be twisted nigh off before I’ll log into my FaceBook page. And, yes, if you’re one of the hundred-odd people who’ve sent me a LinkedIn invitation in the last few years, I hope you don’t feel scorned that I didn’t join you and I’ll ask your forgiveness now… It’s just that I never actually setup an account until today.
But after arriving catastrophically late to the party and reaching out to a dozen connections who might take some pity on my apparently self-induced social media ostracism, I did have a few observations coming in the door:
- Wow, most of you old friends look quite professional in your profile pictures. I find myself wondering if I should shed my sunglasses, or if there’s some value in maintaining profile picture continuity across StackOverflow, GitHub, Discord and all the other tech-oriented services I actually do lurk through regularly.
- Indeed, your profile pictures match some envious résumés and work history. And interestingly, some glaring omissions. I’m looking at you, dear Veebo alumi, and wondering about airing those battle scars publicly as well.
- Even more nostalgia inducing than the prospect of updating my own dusty CV is seeing where so many of you have travelled since we parted company. Being in this soloprenuer consulting thing for so long, it’s easy to forget how many interesting places with great people you’ve worked with. It’s good to see you all again.
So maybe this social media thing isn’t all the cat videos and political noise it’s seemed to be, and I just needed to find the right place. We’ll see. For now, the hour or two on LinkedIn today was actually kind of fun.