One of my biggest misconceptions was that you need experts—that you can’t rank in Google without them. E-A-T and YMYL updates. They even wrote guidelines at Google showing us where to head.
Every channel talked about expertise and trust, about Google’s Medic update and its importance. And here’s what I want to say—sometimes you don’t need experts at all, and the site will still rank.
In my niche, 95% of competitors got filtered a year ago. I thought it was E-A-T and that only experts were needed, but now I see that sites do great even without them. Here’s an example of a competitor with a fake profile: 114k monthly traffic:
The site has no expertise whatsoever and grew from scratch in a year!
I have similar examples where a site was penalized, and then I simply added info articles—which really should rank rather than just exist—and the site starts coming back to life. Without experts, without E-A-T:
Here’s another example from my 10 sites: weekly traffic dropped to 30k unique visitors, but after removing affiliate links from some of the pages, it rose to 75k weekly traffic.
Naturally, there are no experts there, yet you’ll still see people harping on the importance of this factor for Google for years to come. Of course, it all depends on the niche—medicine, health-adjacent, that’s understandable.
I just wanted to show that not everything is as obvious and straightforward as stated in Google’s guidelines for webmasters.