What is considered a YMYL topic, and why does it matter?
Hello, and thanks for listening to SEO tips today.
Google defines YMYL (Your Money or your Life) topics as topics that could potentially impact the future happiness, health, safety, or financial stability of users. There are many other topics related to big decisions or important aspects of people’s lives which thus may be considered YMYL, such as fitness and nutrition, housing information, choosing a college, finding a job, etc.”
Google has also recently added information on groups of people (grouped based on race or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, etc.) as YMYL:
For YMYL topics, there is a high standard for accuracy and a requirement to write about the well-established consensus (where such consensus exists). And any writer on a YMYL site will need to have EAT (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) in the topic.
So, what is EAT?
As I had mentioned before, EAT stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust – of your site and its writers.
Expertise:
This refers to the creator of the main content (MC) on the page.
- Are they an expert on the topic?
- Do they have the credentials to back up that expertise?
- Is this information available to readers on the website?
Authoritativeness:
This refers to the main content creator, the content itself, and the website on which it appears.
“Authoritativeness” means having generally recognized authority.
- Do people know you, know your background, and look to you as a leader in your industry?
- Do they accept you as a good source of information?
Trustworthiness:
The “Trustworthiness” part of E-A-T also refers to the main content creator, the content, and the website. To be a trustworthy expert and source means people can trust you to provide honest, true information, that is accurate.
How can you work to display more EAT signals if you think you might be a YMYL type of site?
Well, in June of 2019, there was a Google core update was focused on the quality of the content on various sites in the YMYL segment. Related to improving your site if it was hit by that update, John Mueller from Google recommended the following:
“What we do have is an older blog post from Amit Singhal which covers a lot of questions that you can ask yourself, about the quality of your website. That’s something I always recommend going through. , That’s something that I would also go through with people who are not associated with your website.”
As an SEO, it’s also important to know that for some industries Google has clearly “white-labeled” a set of YMYL sites (like in the health space) that are consistently taking top rankings. In fact, Google filed a patent about using this approach to speed up rankings. This makes it difficult (or impossible) for smaller sites to rank for a wide variety of queries as demonstrated by page one dominance of a set of sites across a variety of medical-related terms.
The first step is clearly understanding that your site is a YMYL site and then then next step is to generate the type of online and offline signals that you think Google would need to see to demonstrate your site and your writer’s expertise and authority on your topic.
So that’s your tip for today.
Thanks for listening, come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.
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