What are YMYL Websites?

There was a time when you could pop up on Google’s first page overnight. However, Google has made it notoriously difficult for websites to rank, especially if they’re simply trying to please the algorithm.

If you want your web page to rank on Google, you need to build your brand’s expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. These three factors form the acronym E-A-T which has been a buzzword over the past few years.

When this update was rolled out, it seemed like websites that provided health and medical advice that were affected the most. Therefore, Barry Shwartz, a well-known search engine marketing journalist named it “the medic update.”

However, it wasn’t just the medical websites that were hit. Several websites that Google categorized as the YMYL websites were affected severely by this new update.

What is YMYL? And what are YMYL websites?

First things first, YMYL stands for “your money or your life.” And as you may have guessed, YMYL websites are sites that either offer some sort of monetary transaction functionality or provide sensitive information that have the potential to impact the reader’s well-being.

Therefore, Google has developed a system that ensures that users are provided with relevant and accurate information for their queries from credible sources. E-A-T is the system Google has in place to protect users from low-quality information that may have the potential to negatively impact the user’s health, happiness, safety, or financial stability.

Since Google rolled out this new update in 2018, YMYL has become a very popular topic. However, most of the information available online isn’t practical or overly actionable, especially because expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are not tangible metrics.

In this blog, we’ll give you actionable content strategies that you can implement to boost the search rankings for your YMYL websites.

But before we get into that, here’s a list of niches that fall under Google’s YMYL category:

1. News and current events. This includes websites that provide real-time updates about topics that can affect the user’s wellbeing like disasters, politics, business, and more.

2. Finance. Websites that provide financial advice like loans, investing, financial planning, taxes, insurance, banking, and more.

3. Government, civics, and law. For example— Sites that deal with the well-being of civilians, voting, local politics, community development, and more.

4. Shopping. eCommerce websites and sites that provide research information on shopping, and shopping services.

5. Health and safety. This doesn’t just include sites that operate on monetary transactions but also websites that provide information regarding health and medical topics. This includes hospitals, drugs, workplace safety, medical issues, emergency preparedness, etc.

6. Social groups. For example— groups formed based on religion, disability, gender, age, veteran’s status, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, etc.

However, this isn’t a concrete list. Other than these specific categories, any websites that may focus on providing information that can affect important aspects of the user’s life can be categorized under YMYL websites.

For example— websites that offer information on nutrition, fitness, changing careers, choosing a college, housing information, and more are also YMYL websites.

Now that you have a good understanding of YMYL websites, let’s understand how E-A-T affects the search ranking of YMYL websites.

What is EAT in SEO?

According to Google’s search quality evaluator guidelines, E-A-T is one of the most crucial ranking factors that is taken into consideration while selecting an overall Page Quality rating.

In fact, the E-A-T factors are mentioned around 130 times throughout Google’s search quality evaluator guidelines, which should tell you how significant they are when it comes to search rankings.

Essentially, E-A-T is one way for Google to ensure that all the information ranking on the search engine is accurate, truthful, and valuable to the users.

Google has made it easy for anyone in the world to share their knowledge and publish whatever they want to.

You don’t need to have an official medical degree to create content on health and medicine. You don’t need a degree in finance to start a website where you talk about investing.

While this is a good thing for some, that may not always be the case. Many of us turn to Google to make important life decisions. Therefore, Google needs to ensure that all the information it presents is from trustworthy websites.

This is primarily the reason Google takes into account the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of the person who has created a piece of content, the content itself, and the website as a whole.

Based on E-A-T’s guidelines, Google will prioritize a blog by Biro Clinic’s website over a blog by a random website that’s providing unverified medical advice.

But how does Google use E-A-T as a ranking factor?

Here’s the thing.

For anything to be a “ranking factor,” you should be able to measure it.

Google can easily crawl the web and list down exactly how many backlinks point to a web page. Using this data to create an algorithm that ranks pages with the highest backlinks is a simple task.

However, unlike metrics like backlinks, E-A-T’s expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness are not tangible. They’re essentially human concepts that can’t be directly translated into numbers without human intervention.

Here’s where Google’s Quality Raters come into the picture.

Source: Google Search Help

Google’s engineers tweak the algorithm and send a small amount of traffic to the page to gather information about how it affects the search result quality.

They show the search results to these Quality Raters without any information about what tweak was made.

Google has Quality Raters in different parts of the world. The job of these Quality Raters is to use Google’s extensive search quality guidelines to see if the change has a positive or a negative impact on the quality of search result rankings.

If the outcome is good, the search engineers will implement the change on the entire algorithm.

This process allows Google engineers to make changes to the algorithm based on tangible signals that align with E-A-T.

Here’s a video by Google that explains how Google makes changes to its algorithm (https://youtu.be/J5RZOU6vK4Q)

What factors determine the E-A-T of a website?

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. While these concepts may sound somewhat similar to each other, they’re not identical. Let’s discuss the criteria that Google follows to evaluate each of these factors

Expertise

Google considers an expert as someone who has a high level of knowledge and skill in a particular topic or field. Unlike the other two factors, the expertise aspect is evaluated primarily at the level of the main content, not the overall website or business.

Google determines the expertise factor by analyzing the credentials of the content creator. For YMYL websites, Google focuses on content that is created by subject matter experts.

For example, an investment banker with official qualification and real-life investing experience is more qualified to share content about investing than someone who has read a few books and posts on the topic.

Formal experience is more important for some websites than others. For example– medicine, finance, or legal advice.

However, Google doesn’t consider formal qualifications as the be-all-end-all for all YMYL websites.

The bottom line for Google is– What kind of expertise is required for a web page to achieve its purpose? 

The standard for expertise changes depending on the topic in question.

Google prioritizes “everyday experience” over official qualifications for some YMYL topics.

For example, consider a query like “how does having cancer affect your relationships.” Someone who is either living with the disease or has been affected by it in the past is more qualified to answer this question than a doctor with decades of experience.

Authority

While “expertise” is about knowledge or level of skill, “authority” is about reputation. Being an expert is important, but it’s just the beginning. It’s when other niche experts or influencers cite you or your website as a go-to source of information for topics in your niche that you become an authority.

Google measures authority to understand exactly how your website, content, or brand stands apart from other businesses in your niche.

The way Google evaluates authority is by asking its Quality raters to browse the web for information about the brand or individual’s reputation. This reputation research gives Google insight into what real users and experts think about a particular brand or individual.

Quality raters specifically look for reviews, recommendations by niche experts, news articles, and other information from credible sources. They focus on data available from independent sources, i.e, information that isn’t shared by the company or individual itself.

Wikipedia is one such source that quality raters heavily rely on. This is primarily because Wikipedia articles provide detailed information about a company and its reputation like past awards or controversies.

However, authority is a relative concept.

While Jeff Bezos and Amazon are an authority in eCommerce, the same can’t be said when it comes to SEO or weight loss.

On the other hand, there are times when specific people or websites hold unique authority over certain topics. These topics are usually branded topics. For example, if someone wants to learn about Kindle’s publishing guidelines, the most authoritative source is their official website.

Here are some KPIs for judging the authoritativeness of your website:

1. Backlinks from authoritative sources. By authoritative sources, we mean websites and businesses that have already built authority in the niche. When such websites link to your pages, this increases your domain authority.

2. Mentions. While backlinks are great, simply having your brand mentioned on by these authoritative websites will help boost your authority in the eyes of Google.

3. Domain Authority score. Domain Authority is a score between one to 100 that predicts how well a domain will rank on Google. You can use Moz’s Free Domain SEO Analysis Tool to know the current domain authority score for your website.

4. Branding. With focusing a big chunk of your efforts on branding, you’ll definitely see a spike in your SEO authority. The reason is that branded search volume means people are searching for your brand specifically or with a relevant keyword attached, which is great for your authority.

5. Social Media. Building a presence on social media also helps build authority in the eyes of Google. While social media platforms have not always affected a brand’s ranking on Google, that has changed with E-A-T. This is mainly because people are more inclined to share your content on social media platforms which helps build your authority.

6. Wikipedia. We’ve already discussed how Google’s quality raters use Wikipedia pages during their research. This is because having a Wikipedia page signals authority. Getting a Wikipedia page isn’t an easy task unless you’re a well-known individual or a renowned brand. However, if you want to build your authority, striving for a Wikipedia page should definitely be a part of your OKRs.

Trust

With YMYL websites, the trustworthiness of the content that’s published is critical. The information should be legitimate, accurate, and transparent.

As we’ve discussed, expertise and authority are aspects that can help boost your search rankings. On the other hand, trustworthiness, or rather the lack of trust, can cause your search rankings to deteriorate.

Here are a few things you should keep in mind to handle the trust factor efficiently.

1. Information about the author. YMYL websites provide sensitive information; therefore, Google’s quality raters take particular note of whether a website includes information about who is responsible for the content published on the site.

2. Contact information. For YMYL websites, especially in niches like eCommerce or finance, providing detailed contact information is critical. This is because in websites that offer monetary transactions, simply including information like email address and the address of the store’s or office’s physical location isn’t enough. This inadequate information can make things difficult for customers should they need help while facing issues with the transaction.

3. Security. Do a simple Google search for any query and see how many websites that rank aren’t secure. I bet you wouldn’t find any, at least not on the first page. Ensuring Google (and your users) that your website is secure is critical. Therefore, if you haven’t already, correctly implement HTTPS.

4. Accuracy. Accuracy of the content published on YMYL websites is crucial, especially for news articles and medical content.

5. Citations. Providing a good amount of external references from other credible sources shows quality raters that you’ve done your research before publishing your content.

6. Privacy policy. Your website should have a privacy policy page. Additionally, ensure that your privacy policy is easily accessible by placing it in the footer section.

7. Refund and return policies. For eCommerce websites, having a clear return and refund policy boosts trustworthiness. Therefore, if you have a website that accepts transactions, have your return and refund policy specified clearly on your website.

And that’s it!

You now have an in-depth understanding of the three pillars of E-A-T and know exactly how you can incorporate them into your YMYL content strategy and boost your search engine rankings on Google.

If you’re looking for someone to build an SEO strategy for your YMYL website, you can schedule a no-strings-attached discovery call with Teranga today.