"Your Money or Your Life" is a guide for Google searches. YMYL pages are websites that offer tips on topics such as finance, happiness, health, parenting, or nutrition. Such advice can have a significant impact on a person's life. Consequently, bad information can have irreparable consequences.
For this reason, Google is very strict with YMYL pages and judges them rigorously, as it insists on high-quality, reliable information to protect users.
YMYL pages ((Your Money or Your Life) Address or touch upon topics that may potentially affect a person's future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.
A page that explains how to maximize your retirement savings is, for example, a YMYL page. Another example of a YMYL page is a page about the diagnosis and treatment of diabetes.
Examples of YMYL pages are:
EAT – “Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness” – is a principle used by Google's search quality assessors to determine the quality and effectiveness of search results. These assessors are real people who, based on the Search Quality Assessor Guidelines, determine how well Google's search results meet users' needs.
Although EAT is not a direct Google ranking factor, it still goes hand in hand with SEOGoogle introduced the guidelines in 2014 and has updated them approximately once a year since then.
With the May 2019 update to the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the meaning of EAT was slightly changed. It is now a factor in determining page quality and no longer a synonym for page quality.
YMYL pages stand out from other content because they can be harmful to human well-being and/or health. For example, imagine you wake up with a bad cough. You Google: "How to treat a cough."
If you land on a poor source of information that gives you the wrong advice, you could end up suffering even more, and your condition could easily worsen. That's why it's important that Google provides you with high-quality information so that your health isn't negatively affected by the pages you see.
That's why Google has quality evaluators. These are a large number of people who evaluate search results based on specific guidelines. Google's guidelines for quality reviewersTheir work helps Google train its AI-based algorithms and improve the quality of search results. The guidelines tell them how to evaluate the quality of websites.
Because these pages are so important, Google has much higher standards for YMYL pages:
"Low-quality YMYL pages may potentially have a negative impact on a person's happiness, health, financial stability, or safety."
So if you want to rank a page on the topic of "Your Money or Your Life", you'll have to put in a bit more effort.
So how do you optimize YMYL SEO for Google search results? Here are some best practices for YMYL:
Google's evaluation guidelines state that good YMYL content is best created with authoritative, fact-based, and well-researched data that demonstrates your website's expertise on the topic. A good rule of thumb is not to simply repeat general information, but instead to provide helpful information that laypeople might not otherwise find easily.
Your content should focus on topics and not just loosely related keywords for which you want to rank. For better search engine optimization, however, you should conduct thorough keyword research and find intent-based keywords around which you can build your content.
For better search engine optimization, you should also consider making your YMYL page as content-free as possible in areas such as:
From there, you can optimize other on-page SEO factors with your primary keywords – meta data, H tags, anchor text, website structure, etc. This can positively impact your search ranking while ensuring that the content of your YMYL website is based on a strong content foundation.
On-page strategies such as metadata optimization are the best way to influence the appearance of search results:
Optimizing your website with on-page SEO best practices does not mean that your YMYL legitimacy is undermined, but can even improve the user experience and strengthen your reputation:
The main goal here should be to ensure that your target keywords are honest and that your metadata is also honest. Too often, websites focus their SEO strategy on high-traffic keywords. Or, if they can't find keywords that exactly match their page's intent, they try to focus on closely related keywords—which means that visitors who arrive at their site via specific search queries might be disappointed by what they find.
It's best to conduct professional keyword research before starting your SEO campaign. Additionally, you should ensure that you only use keyword-rich title tags, on-page titles, and content that is honest and not misleading.
Even better: Try to align your content with your target keywords from the very beginning, and make sure that it meets the expected needs of your website visitors.
The update to Google's freshness algorithm means that in some cases, the recency and relevance of your content can be very helpful for your SEO ranking.
For certain topics and search queries, Google's algorithm can... “Query deserves freshness” We've found that these topics require up-to-date information. For topics like current news, sports, current events, recurring events, etc., it can be important to provide fresh content.
And for YMYL websites, fresh content can improve perceived quality and boost YMYL SEO.
Google says this about recency:
“Some search queries require very current or ‘fresh’ information. Users may be looking for ‘breaking news,’ for example, about an important event or a natural disaster that is currently taking place.”
Google adds that "neglected/abandoned 'old' websites or neglected and inaccurate/misleading content is a reason for a low page quality rating."
Google's quality assessment guidelines highlight another concept called "need satisfaction." The idea is that the primary purpose of your page should be to ensure that visitors actually get what they came for or find the information they are looking for.
To achieve better YMYL SEO performance, take a step back and ask yourself if your website visitors are truly satisfied with the content. Could they say their needs were met after leaving your site? Put yourself in their shoes and ask them honestly if they would.
Google claims that pages should ensure they fulfill their purpose, both as part of EAT and to better legitimize YMYL: "If a page's EAT is low enough, users cannot or should not use the [main content] of the page."
This applies particularly to YMYL topics. If the site is highly inappropriate, unauthoritative, or untrustworthy, it fails to achieve its purpose” (emphasis added).
This should be an important part of the keyword research phase of your SEO campaign. Understanding the "search intent" behind your most important keywords and your target audience will ensure that you're not just ranking for keywords, but that your YMYL pages actually provide people with what they want in their search queries.
Ads. – We're talking about ads here. Google's page layout algorithm is an older part of the algorithm, dating back to 2012, and aims to prevent websites from placing too many ads at the top of their page.
The ranking algorithm means that websites that place too many ads "above the fold" or whose ad content pushes the main content too far down may be ranked lower in search engine optimization. For this reason, it has been unofficially dubbed the "top-heavy" update.
The goal is to ensure that websites focus more on providing a good user experience and less on making a quick buck. This is especially true for YMYL websites. If Google believes your content focuses more on the financial aspect of YMYL and less on providing value to users, your YMYL SEO performance could suffer.
In fact, user experience has become a key part of Google's overall philosophy. For example, "intrusive interstitials" (also known as interstitial ads or invasive ads that pop up/block the main content) can now be penalized in some cases. This means that YMYL websites should be careful about placing ads or calls to action on their mobile and desktop content.
However, some pop-ups and interstitials are okay: legally required cookie consent requests, login dialogs, banner ads of a "reasonable" size, and age verification pop-ups, for example.
Here too, the key for JMJ pages and good JMJ SEO is to ensure that users receive trustworthy, honest content created with the right intentions. As mentioned in Google's guide to evaluating search quality, websites must avoid "pages that do not fulfill their primary purpose."
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