YMYL simply stands for Your Money Your Life. Precisely, it defines the types of pages and websites that have content that could possibly impact someone’s health, happiness, safety, or financial stability. In this article, we have put together all you need to know about YMYL pages.
Content is central to digital marketing and search engine marketing. To optimize the content on your website for higher visibility on Google, sticking to E-A-T criteria is crucial. This is all the more important for websites and pages with YMYL content.
But why is it so? What is it about YMYL content that pages and websites producing it are kept under strict scrutiny by the search engine giant?
For new and budding SEO practitioners, being thoroughly familiar with terms like YMYL, E-A-T, etc. is crucial. However, many online guides make these terms appear complex and intimidating. And in fact, digital marketers are guilty of having developed such confusing insider lingo. Although, this time it’s Google itself that’s come up with the terms “YMYL” and “EAT”. But don’t worry, we’ve got you.
What are YMYL pages or websites?
YMYL expands as Your Money Your Life. Pages or websites that produce content with subjects related to finance, medicine, commerce, etc. come under YMYL. Such content can potentially impact one’s happiness, health, safety, mental and financial stability, and the likes. As it concerns people’s happiness, health and wealth, Google doesn’t take it lightly.
What types of websites come under YMYL?
The list below contains the examples of YMYL websites as Google defines in its quality guidelines:
- News and current event sites
- Civics, government, and law sites
- Finance sites
- Shopping websites
- Healthy and safety sites
- Sites on groups of people
However, this list isn’t absolute. It just broadly defines the types of YMYL sites. In fact, any sites related to big decisions or important aspects of people’s lives can come under this category.
YMYL & EAT
Now you know that Google pays special attention to websites serving YMYL content. Thus, if your YMYL website publishes content that can potentially harm your visitors’ health, emotions, financial stability or general well-being in any way, Google may demote your ranking and lessen your visibility.
So, how do you avoid such scenario? This is where EAT comes into equation.
What is EAT?
E-A-T is short for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.
According to Google’s content guidelines, websites need to reflect expertise, authority and trustworthiness in their content. While this is important for all the websites, it’s a little more so for YMYL websites. This is because YMYL covers such topics that can affect people’s health or wealth.
For example, a blog posted by a non-expert in medicine on an untrustworthy website that lacks authority is most likely to be misleading and/or inaccurate. Google wants to keep from surfacing such content. Thus, it has introduced EAT criteria to help YMYL websites produce quality content.
YMYL, EAT & SEO
SEO agencies in chennai aims at improving Google rankings and visibility of a website. Being through with YMYL & EAT is crucial for SEO. Why?
If your YMYL content doesn’t conform to EAT norms, Google could throw your website deep into the ocean of search results. Your website will probably never be able to cope up from it. Thus, following EAT criteria for content creation is necessary. And in fact, it makes sense for Google to do so. If it lets content that lacks expertise, authority, and trustworthiness to be surfaced on SERPs, it could mislead and harm people. Therefore, such websites are penalised by Google.
All of the SEO efforts will go to vain if your content isn’t up to the mark with Google’s quality standards. Thus, for higher ranking and visibility, it is important for YMYL websites to follow EAT criteria.
Conclusion
Ever since Google medic update in 2018, YMYL became a buzzword in the SEO world. Standing for Your Money Your Life, YMYL broadly defines such pages/websites the content of which has potential to impact someone’s happiness, health or wealth. Google makes it important for such sites to follow EAT (Expertise, Authority & Trustworthiness) criteria. Conforming to EAT helps a website make sure it’s not creating any harmful YMYL content. This is apparently important for sound SEO & digital marketing campaign.
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