E-E-A-T in an online store: authors, expert reviewers and author pages

You sell food supplements, cosmetics, baby products or medical supplies. Your customer reads the product page and wonders whether what it says is true. Google asks itself the same question. In those sectors, a text with nobody identifiable behind it loses out to one signed by someone who knows the subject and can prove it.

That is what E-E-A-T is about: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It is not an SEO trick; it is a way of organising what makes content credible.

What E-E-A-T is, and what it isn't

It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. These terms appear in the guidelines Google gives its quality raters, the people who assess search results to help improve the algorithms. "Experience" was added later to recognise the value of someone who has genuinely used a product, even if they are not a specialist.

Two things are worth being clear about:

• It is not a single score that Google calculates and applies to your website. It is a set of signals that the systems try to recognise.
• Trustworthiness is the core. Highly expert but misleading content is not trustworthy.

It carries more weight in what Google calls YMYL topics ("your money or your life"): health, safety, finance, legal information. If you sell in those sectors, it affects you directly.

Where it matters in a store

• Product pages that make claims: benefits of a supplement, ingredients of a cream, directions for use, technical compatibility.
• Buying guides and blog: "how to choose…", "which is best for…".
• Category pages with explanatory text.
• Corporate pages: about us, contact, returns policy. Trustworthiness starts with people knowing who is selling.

Author and reviewer: two different roles

You don't need a doctor to write every product page. The usual approach in sensitive sectors is to separate:

• Author: whoever writes it. That can be your content team or yourself.
• Reviewer: a professional with the right qualifications who checks that what has been written is correct. A dietitian reviews a protein product page; a pharmacist, a pharmacy product; a technician, a professional tool.

Showing both, with their roles, is honest and useful for the customer: they know who wrote it and who validated it.

What an author page should contain

1. Real name and photo.
2. Job title and qualifications, with their professional registration number where applicable and if the professional agrees to show it.
3. Specialities and relevant experience.
4. A short biography, written for people.
5. Verifiable links: professional profile, publications, personal website.
6. What they have written or reviewed in your store.

And what it shouldn't contain: their personal email address or any details the professional hasn't agreed to publish.

If you work with an external reviewer, put it in writing: what they review, how often and what happens if they disagree with a text. If they stop working with you, remove their name from anything they haven't reviewed and assign another reviewer.

How to show it on the product page

A short box with photo, name, job title and role ("Written by…", "Reviewed by…"), linking to their author page. Next to the product information or at the end of the tabs, without upstaging the add-to-cart button. If the content was reviewed on a certain date, say so and update it when you review it again.

Structured data

Structured data doesn't create E-E-A-T, but it helps search engines understand who is behind the content. The schema.org types that fit:

• Person for each expert, with their name, job title, affiliation and links (sameAs).
• author on articles and pages, pointing to that person.
• reviewedBy on the page, for the reviewer.
• ProfilePage on each author's page.

Check that the markup doesn't duplicate what your theme already outputs. Old PrestaShop 1.6 and 1.7 themes often carry incomplete or outdated microdata that clashes with the JSON-LD added by modules; keeping the store and theme up to date avoids those conflicts.

Experience: what only you can contribute

The first "E" is the easiest one for a store: you handle the product. Your own photos of real use, measurements you have checked, what happens when it is washed, how it is assembled, who it is not recommended for. That is experience, and no generic manufacturer text has it.

If you use artificial intelligence to write, Google doesn't penalise content for how it was produced, but for whether it is useful and trustworthy. A text generated and reviewed by a real expert is fine; a text generated and signed by an expert who hasn't read it is not.

Common mistakes

• Signing everything as "Editorial team".
• Invented experts or experts with stock photos.
• Reviewers who haven't reviewed anything.
• Empty author pages, with no links or content.
• Health claims that the regulations don't allow, signed by a professional.
• Structured data duplicated by, or contradicting, the theme's.

Checklist

• Identify which product pages and guides deal with sensitive topics.
• Assign an author and, for sensitive content, a real, qualified reviewer.
• Create a page for each expert with verifiable credentials.
• Show authorship on the product page without hiding the purchase button.
• Mark up Person, author, reviewedBy and ProfilePage without duplicates.
• Review the content regularly and update the review date.

How to do it in PrestaShop

RKR Authors & Reviewers creates a profile for each expert (photo, job title, qualifications, specialities, biography and links such as LinkedIn or ORCID), distinguishes author from reviewer, shows a box with a review badge on product pages and CMS pages, generates a public experts page and a page for each expert, and outputs Person, author, reviewedBy and ProfilePage. Its console assigns experts to many products at once, with a filter for products without an expert, and the expert's email is never shown. For your guides, Easy Blog puts the blog inside PrestaShop with article and author (Person) markup and an author page listing their articles.