There are two acronyms that are very critical for the website’s SEO and Google uses them in order to rank the websites. These two acronyms are YMYL and EAT. EAT metric is used by Google for judging a page’s quality. But, in order to understand this page quality metric in a better way, you must first know about YMYL. In this article, let us understand what YMYL is and how is it important for search engine optimization.
What is YMYL?
YMYL is the acronym for “Your Money or Your Life“. If a webpage is affecting someone’s money or someone’s life than it is a YMYL page. And Google observes such pages very closely.
Google aims at delivering quality and relevant results to the people searching for information on the internet. In this digital era, lives are affected and influenced heavily by the content available on the internet.
This means that if any misleading or wrong content is present over the internet, many innocent people will fall prey to it too.
Google doesn’t want its users to fall prey to such content.
Understanding YMYL with few examples
Imagine a website having financial information like investment planning, life insurance, taxes, etc. A layman who has minimal information regarding all these concepts depends highly on such websites.
Consider a person who wants to know about taxation related information and searches about it on Google. He finds a blog on Google and reads it. Suppose the information on the blog is not trustworthy or misleading, it can cause in loss of money.
Suppose a person if searching for information about the medicine and finds incorrect information. This can even endanger his life.
Similarly, if there is some activity that requires safety. For instance, a person wants to repair his electric switchboard and uses some “how-to” blog which ranked higher but had incorrect information. In this case, this can lead to short-circuiting, can set the house on fire and even cause damage to the life of the person, family and neighborhood too.
Hence, it is very crucial in such instances that the information is accurate and trustworthy.
YMYL sites are the websites’ containing
- medical information,
- legal information,
- financial information,
- safety information,
- shopping information or
- information influencing your current/future
Importance of YMYL in SEO
These sites are rated very carefully by Google’s quality raters. Google have raters across the globe who rate such sites on the basis of quality. The raters specifically rate the top pages in the result set. Users are most likely to click on the top results and hence, they must be scrutinized very keenly.
When the quality raters are evaluating YMYL sites, they follow a strict set of standards to evaluate their quality. Hence, YMYL websites should satisfy both Google search algorithms and page quality raters.
This can be done by having the best content. The content should be developed by experts. If the content is accurate, trustworthy and relevant, the page quality will be more. Among the set of standards that the evaluators check for, one of the factors is E-A-T (or EAT).
E-A-T is the acronym for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. This implies that the author of the content should be an expert, should be a well-recognized authority in that niche and should be trustworthy.
As page quality plays a key role in SEO, YMYL sites should consider the guidelines laid down by Google and ensure that they emphasize on E-A-T to rank higher.
Conclusion
Other than the points discussed above, keep the information on your website updated. Ensure that you are providing detailed content that helps the reader. The purpose of the website should be well-established & content should be in-line with the purpose. The more accurate the information, the better. The more expertise the author has in the niche, the better will be the quality of the content. YMYL is all about enhancing the experience of the readers while safeguarding their lives and/or money. YMYL is one of the key digital marketing trends for marketing success in 2020.
Also read – E-A-T in SEO
Happy Reading!