Over the past year, you saw that YMYL and EAT were often mentioned in SEO discussions. They are taken from the Google Search Quality Assessment Guide (PDF) and are used by a team of experts who manually evaluate the quality of Google search results.
Although these recommendations are not intended for SEO purposes, they give us an additional understanding of what Google is looking for on pages and in content - and recent changes to Google’s core algorithm suggest that YMYL and EAT filters play a key role in search ranking. And the Guide helps those for whom promotion in Google TOP is important.
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What are YMYL pages?
YMYL means “your money or your life,” and that’s how Google treats web pages and content that can negatively impact people's quality of life and / or finances. Or, as Google describes them in their Search Quality Rating Recommendations, “pages or topics [that] can potentially affect future happiness, health, financial stability, or human security.”
Google offers the following sample YMYL pages:
• News and current affairs: News about important topics such as international events, business, politics, science, technology, etc.
• Civil law, government, and law: information important to keep citizens informed, such as information on voting, government agencies, government agencies, social services, and legal issues.
• Finance: financial advice or information regarding investments, taxes, retirement planning, loans, banking or insurance, especially web pages that allow people to shop or transfer money online.
• Shopping: information or services related to researching or purchasing goods / services, especially web pages that allow people to shop online.
• Health and safety: consultations or information about medical problems, medicines, hospitals, emergency preparedness, etc.
• Groups of people: information about people grouped by race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity.
• Other: there are many other topics related to important decisions or important aspects of people's lives, which, therefore, can be considered YMYL, such as fitness and nutrition, housing information, college choice, job search, etc.
Why are YMYL pages important?
Google wants to provide the best content for every request, and also wants users to know that they can trust its results. This is naturally in the interests of Google, but the appearance in recent years of fake news and revelations that the right-wing publishers manipulated Google’s search results has forced the tech giant to take a more aggressive stance on insecure content.
Google has updated its Search Quality Ranking Guidelines, in which EAT and YMYL are widely used as a means of determining the reliability of content. For marketers, the most important aspect is that YMYL pages have been hit especially hard by recent updates to Google’s core algorithm.