During a hangout, John Mueller explained and reiterated that there is no E-A-T Score on Google.
Our SEO Lead, Brian Harnish, has a comprehensive argument on the topic as well.
An SEO professional was concerned about their author archive pages in Google Search Console.
They received a notification about their archive pages that were missing a field URL.
As a result, they just want to noindex their author archive pages. They wanted to know if that would solve the problem, and how much of an impact it would have on search.
These pages don’t have keywords anyway. Additionally, they also asked if their E-A-T score would go down if they noindex their author archive pages.
John explained – and reiterated, again – that Google does not have an E-A-T score.
He said that SEO professionals do not have to worry about that.
The notification they received is more than likely related to the structured data on these pages.
If you don’t want those pages indexed, the notification can be cleared by noindexing the pages.
Furthermore, if you’re using a plugin that generates structured data for these pages, then you may want to disable this as well.
Fixing the fields for that structured data will also repair the problem.
John expounded that both solutions are fine because the structured data on these pages is not critical for the SEO professional’s site, so it will not have a negative impact on the site in the search results.
If you’re seeing traffic to these pages, you may want to put in the work and keep them indexed and repair the structured data fields.
Otherwise, it should be fine noindexing them from the search results entirely.
This happens at approximately the 48:01 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
Let’s see, I have a question about a notification from Search Console. It’s about my author archive pages that are missing a field URL. I would like to noindex my author archive pages, will it solve the problem? Or will it have an impact on my site appearing in search? The author archive pages don’t have any keywords anyway. Are they important for E-A-T? Will my E-A-T score go down if I noindex the author archive pages?
John (Answer) 48:31
So we don’t have an E-A-T score. So from that point of view, you don’t have to worry about that. In general, the notification you received in Search Console is probably about structured data that you’re using on these pages. And if you don’t want those pages indexed, then by noindexing those pages, you will remove that notification as well.
If you’re using some kind of a plugin on your site that generates structured data there, then maybe you can disable it for those author pages and it’ll be fixed as well. Or maybe you can fix the fields that the structured data provides, and that will also solve the problem. My guess is that the structured data that you’re using on these pages is not critical for your site. It is not something that we would show in the search results directly anyway.
So from that point of view, probably you’re fine with either removing the structured data from those pages, no indexing those pages, if they’re not critical for your site, all of that would be fine.
I think I would see this slightly differently if I knew that this was a site that really focused a lot on the authority and kind of the knowledge and the name of the authors, where if people are actively searching for the name of the author, then your collection of content by that author might be actually useful to have in the search results.
So for those kind of sites, I think it would be useful to keep that index, but then you would probably already want to keep that index because they’re getting traffic from search. So if you’re not seeing any traffic at all to these author pages, and they’re just random people who are writing for your blog, or something like that, then probably no indexing them would be fine.
