Every time a core update lands, someone tells me E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor. Technically true, practically irrelevant. The systems that grade health content are trained on what trustworthy medical publishing looks like, and a page with no author, no reviewer and no source is not that. Here is the checklist I actually use.
Why health pages are graded differently
Google’s own quality guidelines single out pages that can affect a person’s health, financial stability or safety. In practice that means a mediocre page about garden furniture survives where an equally mediocre page about medication interactions does not.
The asymmetry matters because it changes where you spend. On a commodity site, more content usually beats better content. In healthcare, the reverse is nearly always true — and I have watched clients spend six figures learning it the hard way.
- A page with no named author starts behind.
- A page with no clinician review starts further behind.
- A page that contradicts primary literature does not recover.
The eleven-point pre-publish check
Nothing here is exotic. It is the discipline of doing all of it, every time, that separates libraries that survive updates from libraries that get rebuilt every eighteen months.
- Named author with a real, off-site verifiable identity.
- Credentialed medical reviewer, named separately from the author.
- Visible review date, updated when the content is genuinely revised.
- Citations to primary literature or a recognized body, not to another blog.
- A clear statement of what the page is not — no page should imply diagnosis.
- Author and reviewer pages that exist, are indexable, and list credentials.
- Person and MedicalWebPage schema referencing both.
- Contact and editorial-policy pages reachable within one click.
- No affiliate or ad placement inside clinical guidance.
- Reading level checked — patient-facing means patient-readable.
- An internal link path to the relevant service or consultation page.
Making it survive contact with a real team
A checklist that lives in my head is worthless. The version that works is a required field in the CMS: publishing is blocked until the reviewer field is filled. Process beats intention every time.
On the telehealth recovery I ran last year, this single change — reviewer as a mandatory field — did more for the library than any individual rewrite.
What to do this week
Pull your twenty highest-traffic health pages. Count how many have a named reviewer. If the answer is under half, you have found your next quarter’s project.
Three things not to bother with
There is a lot of E-E-A-T theatre in this industry. Skip these.
- Author bio stuffing. Padding a bio with keywords helps nobody and reads badly.
- Buying a reviewer byline. A clinician who has not read the page is a liability, not a signal.
- Trust badges. No crawler cares about an image of a shield.
