McGarrah Technical Blog

Improving E-E-A-T Signals for Google AdSense Approval on Jekyll

By · 7 min read

In my previous post on AdSense rejection debugging, I focused on technical issues — sitemap 404 errors, missing contact pages, and thin content analysis. Those were real problems worth fixing, but they weren’t the whole story.

After more research, I realized I was ignoring something Google cares deeply about: E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These are the signals Google’s quality raters use to evaluate whether a site deserves to surface in search results and, by extension, whether it’s worthy of showing ads.

The frustrating part? I have strong E-E-A-T credentials. 25+ years in the industry, an M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech focused on AI/ML, published research, and a career spanning cloud architecture, data science, and enterprise infrastructure. But none of that was visible to Google’s crawlers.

What Is E-E-A-T and Why Does It Matter for AdSense?

Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines define E-E-A-T as:

For AdSense, Google wants to place ads on sites that won’t embarrass their advertisers. A site with strong E-E-A-T signals looks like a legitimate publication. A site without them — even with great content — looks like an anonymous blog that could disappear tomorrow.

The Problem: Hidden Credentials

My site had all the raw ingredients but none of the presentation:

Google’s crawlers saw a site with good content but no verifiable author. That’s a red flag.

Fix 1: Structured Author Data in Jekyll Config

The jekyll-seo-tag plugin generates structured data from _config.yml. My author field was a plain string:

# Before
author: "Michael McGarrah"

Changed to a hash with contact details so the plugin emits richer Person schema:

# After
author:
  name: "Michael McGarrah"
  email: "mcgarrah@gmail.com"
  uri: "https://mcgarrah.org/about/"

Fix 2: Author Byline on Every Post

Every post now shows who wrote it. I added a byline to the _includes/meta.html template with a rel="author" link:

<span class="post-byline">By <a href="/about/" rel="author">Michael McGarrah</a></span>

This is what Google’s quality raters are explicitly trained to look for — visible author attribution on content pages.

Fix 3: Author Bio on Every Post

Created _includes/author-bio.html — a compact bio box that appears at the bottom of every post with credentials and rel="me" links to authoritative profiles:

This gives Google multiple verifiable signals connecting the content to a real person with real credentials. The rel="me" attribute is specifically how search engines verify cross-platform identity.

The footer/sidebar already linked to my external profiles, but without rel="me". Updated _includes/menu.html to add the attribute to LinkedIn, GitHub, GitLab, ORCID, Stack Overflow, Google Scholar, and ResearchGate links.

Fix 5: About Page Restructured for E-E-A-T

The About page was rewritten to front-load verifiable credentials:

Fix 6: dateModified on 63 Posts

The jekyll-seo-tag plugin uses the last_modified_at front matter field to emit dateModified in structured data. Only 4 of my 125 posts had this field.

I wrote a script to pull the last git commit date for every post from 2023 onward and added last_modified_at to 59 additional posts. The jekyll-seo-tag plugin now emits proper dateModified for 63 posts, telling Google the content is actively maintained.

# Example: git log gives the real last-edit date
git log -1 --format='%ai' -- _posts/2025-10-26-usb-drive-smart.md
# 2026-02-04 (content was updated, not just the original post date)

Fix 7: Wikidata Entry

This was the most unexpected change. Wikidata is the structured data backend for Wikipedia, and Google uses it heavily for Knowledge Panels. I created Q138858864 with:

This is the most reliable path to getting a Google Knowledge Panel, which is the ultimate E-E-A-T signal — Google itself vouching for your identity.

Fix 8: Content Cluster Hub Page

My Proxmox and Ceph posts are my strongest content — deep technical articles based on hands-on homelab experience. But several had zero internal links to related posts. Google uses internal link structure to identify topical authority.

Created the Proxmox & Ceph Homelab Guide as a pillar page that organizes 20+ related articles into logical sections:

Then added “Related Articles” sections to the 5 orphaned posts that had no internal links, connecting them back into the cluster.

Summary of All E-E-A-T Changes

Change E-E-A-T Signal Files Modified
Structured author config Expertise, Trustworthiness _config.yml
Author byline on posts Authoritativeness _includes/meta.html
Author bio with credentials Experience, Expertise _includes/author-bio.html, _layouts/post.html
rel="me" on profile links Authoritativeness _includes/menu.html
About page restructured All four pillars README.md
dateModified on 63 posts Trustworthiness 59 post files
Wikidata entry (Q138858864) Authoritativeness External
Hub page + cross-links Expertise, Experience 6 files + new page
Google Search Console DNS verification Trustworthiness External

What’s Left

The one thing I can’t automate: external citations. Getting other sites to link to my content is the strongest E-E-A-T signal but requires manual effort. My plan:

I do all of these already when I see something I can contribute too quickly but I’ll just press on the gas a bit and do a few extra.

The Bigger Picture

None of these changes altered my actual content. The articles are the same. The expertise is the same. What changed is how that expertise is presented to machines.

That’s the frustrating reality of modern SEO and AdSense approval — having credentials isn’t enough. You have to make them machine-readable, cross-referenced, and independently verifiable. A 25-year career means nothing to a crawler if it can’t find structured data confirming it.

I’ll update this post and the original AdSense debugging post when I resubmit and get a response.

Tags: google, adsense, jekyll, github-pages, seo, eeat, structured-data, wikidata
Categories: web-development, technical
About the Author: Michael McGarrah is a Cloud Architect with 25+ years in enterprise infrastructure, machine learning, and system administration. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science (AI/ML) from Georgia Tech and a B.S. in Computer Science from NC State University, and is currently pursuing an Executive MBA at UNC Wilmington. LinkedIn · GitHub · ORCID · Google Scholar · Resume