Google Currently Ignores Author Profiles and E-E-A-T Entities Outside News Sites
Entity SEO vendors pitch E-E-A-T optimization as a ranking lever, yet sites drop during updates both with and without author bylines.
Olesia Korobka argues that outside news sites — where transparency rules require listing and interlinking an author — author profiles and E-E-A-T entities have zero effect on how a site ranks so far.
Sites rank the same with real authors, fake personas, or no author attribution at all; Google has not penalized sites for fake authorship to date, and no SERP impact from E-E-A-T factors has ever materialized, though future Core Updates may still attempt to enforce it.
Across non-news niches, attaching real experts to a site helped SEO only when those authors placed external backlinks to the project from their own blogs or social media accounts.
When sites lose positions in current updates, the losses most likely stem from poor content or detached backlinks — Google discounting the link weight pointing to the domain — rather than missing E-E-A-T signals, requiring operators to source replacement links to recover top search or AI rankings.
Separately, Olesia describes building synthetic author personas with an Indian team in the horoscope niche — a time-intensive conveyor-belt setup that worked for a period before it stopped working.
The operation recruited women who genuinely believed in tarot, paid them a salary, and signed official contracts for the right to operate their personas under a pseudonym.
Taking a practitioner's real Facebook profile — for example, a woman named Rebecca — the setup rebranded the persona under a pseudonym such as "Juicy Juice," published a numerology book under that name on Amazon, and ran free book giveaways to secure an Amazon author panel.
A dedicated personal website where the persona published content completed the footprint, and the setup cross-linked these entities across money sites to convince Google's algorithm that a real published author stood behind the pages.