Required Website Pages

Most websites launch with a homepage, services, and a blog — and skip the About, Contact, and Privacy Policy pages. That's a common mistake: without them, Google sees an anonymous source with no confirmed expertise. These are the first pages Quality Raters check when evaluating a site's E-E-A-T.

Trust pages and E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It's not a direct algorithmic ranking signal — it's an evaluation framework Google uses through Quality Raters to train its algorithms.

The Search Quality Rater Guidelines explicitly instruct raters: when evaluating YMYL sites (finance, health, law), check whether you can find information about the site's owner, their contact details, and a data handling policy. If these pages are missing, the site gets a low T (Trust) score. Trust is the most important of the four E-E-A-T components — without it, the other three barely count.

E-E-A-T: key facts

About page: the main trust signal

Your About page is your public profile. It's where you prove that a real person or organisation — with genuine expertise in the topic — stands behind the site. Missing it is like operating without a business card: technically possible, but trust takes a hit.

Add Organization or Person structured markup from Schema.org directly to your About page. This helps Google correctly identify your organisation in the Knowledge Graph and display it in knowledge panels.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": ["WebPage", "AboutPage"],
  "name": "About — Example Agency",
  "url": "https://example.com/about",
  "description": "We are an SEO team with 10 years of experience.",
  "about": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "Example Agency",
    "url": "https://example.com",
    "logo": "https://example.com/logo.png",
    "foundingDate": "2014",
    "sameAs": [
      "https://www.linkedin.com/company/example",
      "https://twitter.com/example"
    ]
  }
}

Contact and legal pages

A Contact page confirms that people can actually reach you — it's a baseline trust signal for both Google and users. Legal pages (Privacy Policy, Terms of Service) are required for YMYL sites and e-commerce, and mandated by law in most jurisdictions — including GDPR, CCPA, and similar regulations.

Add ContactPage markup from Schema.org to your contact page: "@type": ["WebPage", "ContactPage"]. If you have a physical office, extend it with PostalAddress and GeoCoordinates — this sends a strong local SEO signal.

Technical pages for SEO

Some pages users rarely see — but Googlebot visits regularly. They affect crawl efficiency, indexation, and user experience quality. Most sites skip them at launch and silently lose value for years.

• Custom 404 page. A bare server error page with no navigation spikes bounce rates. A custom 404 with menus and a search box brings users back into your site structure.
• HTML sitemap. Mirrors the XML sitemap in human-readable form. Especially valuable for deep sites with large category trees.
• Orphan pages. Pages with no internal inbound links effectively don't exist — they receive no crawl budget. Find them with Screaming Frog or similar tools.
• Site search page. For large sites, a search form plus results page is a UX must-have. Users who search convert at 2–3x the rate of passive browsers.

Always make your custom 404 page return a 404 or 410 HTTP status, never 200. A page returning 200 for a non-existent URL is a 'soft 404'. Google treats it as low-quality content and may drop it from the index.

# Check the HTTP status code of your 404 page:
curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}\n" https://example.com/non-existent-page

# Expected result: 404
# If you see 200 — it is a soft 404, fix it in your server or framework config

Full page checklist

Below is a summary of all required pages with their priority level. 'Critical' means that the absence of this page directly reduces your E-E-A-T score or commercial potential.

zoom_in