30-second summary:
- Your money or your life (YMYL) guidance has been updated to give more clarity on what Google is looking for within its quality rater guidelines
- Focusing on reputation, both of the person creating the main content and the website hosting the main content, is key
- YMYL trust isn’t just built on-site, off-site digital PR and link acquisition can also play a key role in building trust
- Google also helped to clarify which websites/content might fall into the YMYL categories and how this is defined
- E-A-T continues to play an important role across the board, alongside matching user intent and purpose and creating great, reputable content for users
In late July, Google updated its Page Quality Rater Guidelines. It does this from time to time to reinforce the key principles that it looks for when evaluating the quality of a page. While Google has held the concept of expertise, authority and trust close to the center of these guidelines for a long time, one of the major changes or updates was related to the definition of “Your Money or Your Life” websites. There was also more insight into how these pages are rated, which is ideal for anyone working in these sectors looking to better understand how Google rates their websites.
The concept of Google having very high Page Quality rating guidelines for ‘Your Money or Your Life’ (YMYL) websites isn’t new, but the definition of what falls into this category has changed. Previously the definition covered “pages (which) could potentially impact the future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users.” This has been updated to cover “pages (which) have a high risk of harm because content about these topics could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the