What’s a YMYL site and how does it impact SEO?

Another day, another SEO acronym to learn! ‘YMYL’ is one of the many terms flying around – so what is it, and how does it impact your site?

YMYL covers topics which could impact on ‘Your Money or Your Life‘. It’s a category of content where small inaccuracies could cause harm for readers.

Harm could include things like a making an unwise investment based on inaccurate or outdated advice, taking medical advice from someone unqualified, or aiming for an incorrect evacuation route in an emergency.

For websites with YMYL content, the bar is set much higher in terms of the level of trust required. It’s essential for these websites to demonstrate a high level of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (yep, E-E-A-T‘s another acronym you’ll see a lot of !)

Is my website a YMYL site?

Google splits YMYL content into two main categories:

1. Content that itself is harmful. This can include topics such as extremism, criminal acts and self-harm, which search engines will be trying to hide from the results.

2. Content where inaccuracies could cause harm. These are legitimate topics where expert advice is essential, and affect a lot of business’s websites.

There are a LOT of topics out there, so there’s not a definitive checklist of what is or isn’t YMYL content. Instead, you need to consider whether the potential consequences could cause harm. If an inaccuracy “could potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety”, then it could be YMYL content.

YMYL content might not be present across an entire website – it could just be a subfolder or a group of pages. It’s also worth noting that YMYL content functions on a spectrum. A page might clearly come under the YMYL category, clearly not come under the category, or be somewhere in between.

Another area to clarify is that it’s only if the topic is potentially harmful, not whether the page itself is. For example, a page written about children’s TV characters which contains malware isn’t treated as a YMYL page, even though it can cause harm.

The best thing to do is to think about your content through the lens of the impact it might have. Taking ‘news’ as a category, the latest celebrity gossip wouldn’t be treated as YMYL content, but breaking updates about a military conflict would be.

How do I rank a YMYL page?

If a page clearly contains YMYL content, then it will need to meet more stringent Page Quality guidelines before it has a chance to rank well.

Page Quality ratings are used by Google to help test whether the search results are helpful for users, and to improve the results. This is done by getting a team of Search Quality Raters to look at what’s showing up for various search results, and rate the pages they see. From these results, Google can review how well the algorithm is working and make further tweaks.

Page Quality considerations include:

• Whether the site facilitates payment or not (if it does, there are more expectations)
• The potential of the site or page to cause harm
• Whether the title is a good indication of what the page is about
• Whether ads affect the usability or experience of the page
• The reputation of the website and content author
• Whether the content is original
• The effort a human being has put into creating the page
• The accuracy of the content
• Whether the page shows enough talent and skill to provide a satisfying experience for the visitor.

While Page Quality isn’t a direct ranking factor, it gives a clear indication of what Google expects from a high quality webpage. We can use this information to help improve our own websites and rank better.

9 tips for ranking a YMYL page:

1. Make good use of author pages

Part of demonstrating expertise in a topic means showing who’s writing your content and what their qualifications are.

Author pages and bios are one of the key areas on your site to do this. At a minimum, each blog post should include a link to the author’s profile. Many sites like to go a step further and include a short bio and photograph too.

2. Include your experts in the content creation process

While Google would like content to be written by subject matter experts, this isn’t always practical or possible. Your topic experts might not be skilled, confident, or even interested in authoring content for your website!

Before you sack your writing team, there are a couple of ways you can get around this whilst maintaining good E-E-A-T signals:

• Interview the subject matter experts in your business (or guest industry experts), and use their responses to craft the text. This means you’ll be able to make good use of their first-hand experience, which also helps meet the Page Quality requirement for original content. You should mention the expert by name in the article, and could link the text to their profile page on the website. Don’t list them as the author if they’re not, but you could use a tag such as ‘contributor’ or ‘reviewed by’ (see below).
• Asking an expert to peer-review the content and then adding their name and author link as a reviewer on the content. After the E-E-A-T algorithm update, some medical sites using a generic author (e.g. ‘writer team’) got hit. They found that including the named author, along with a ‘medically reviewed by…’ tag linked to the reviewer’s author page made a signfiicant positive impact on their SEO.

One of the roles of the expert is to fact-check the content and ensure what’s included is correct and safe advice. Accuracy is a key element of Page Quality, and for YMYL topics, content is expected to be both accurate and “consistent with well-established expert consensus.”

3. Keep information up to date

Remember that in YMYL content, small inaccuracies could potentially cause harm. Because of this, it’s really important to keep content up to date as new information or legislation comes into play.

It’s helpful to maintain a content audit spreadsheet which shows:

• When the page was last updated
• A date when it should next be reviewed, e.g. 3, 6 or 12 months time
• Which topics are covered on each page (if it’s not obvious from the title)

The first two will help you maintain content accuracy on a rolling basis, and the last makes it quicker to locate relevant pages if there’s an update to information or legislation outside of the usual update schedule.

To help build trust with both the reader and search engines, it’s useful to include a ‘last updated’ tag directly on the page, as well as within your article schema.

5. Focus on relevant backlinks

It’s best practice anyway to focus on relevant backlinks – but this is even more valuable for YMYL pages.

Skip the temptation to just go after backlinks with a high domain authority. Instead, aim to build relevant links which can help to boost the trustworthiness of your site. Relevant links are often from other sites within your industry, or from sites talking about related topics. If geography is important for your business, then local links can also help to boost trust.

You might also want to target higher authority links within your industry, for example if there’s a well respected industry journal. These are usually a challenge to get, but can be a strong indicator that your site can be seen as a trusted source.

6. Highlight experience within an article

As well as highlighting real-world experience within your author page, it’s helpful to include this in the article where it’s relevant. For example, if you have a journalist reporting on an emergency situation and they’re there in person, include this in the article.

First-hand experience is viewed as a positive signal across all sites. A product review by someone who’s actually used the product (rather than just read about it) is much more valuable to the reader. This experience is often demonstrated both through text and other media, such as videos highlighting specific aspects. It’s not always possible to include this angle in YMYL content, but it’s worth keeping it in mind.

8. Stay on top of security

It’s expected that all websites will now run from a secure protocol, i.e. https:// rather than http://. If your site isn’t already doing this, that’s an absolute priority (and make sure to treat this as an SEO migration!)

E-commerce sites and those handling transaction data will need to go further to keep customer data safe. This can include requiring the use of strong customer passwords and using a firewall to protect credit card information.

Beyond this, it’s important to keep the admin access to your website secure too. Hacked or defaced websites are automatically given the lowest Page Quality rating. Along with this, you also risk reputational damage if a hacker gains access to your site.

There are too many recommendations to fit into this blog, but some key elements include:

• Keeping your CMS platforms, themes, plugins and any other code updated – many updates are for security reasons and will fix things hackers could exploit.
• Not using ‘admin’ or another easily-guessed username.
• Hiding your admin login page.
• Running regular malware scans.
• Getting notified whenever a folder or file on your website is changed.

9. Manage your online reputation

We know that it’s not just what you say on your website that’s taken into account by Google – it’s also what other people are saying about you or your business. Your online reputation is a powerful trust signal – or the opposite, if there’s something negative out there.

Examples of independent reputation information include:

• Features in the media or high-quality informational articles (e.g. Wikipedia is still seen as a trusted source of information).
• Information about awards
• Customer reviews on social media, Google Business Profiles, TrustPilot etc.
• Any controversies or criminal issues.

To review what’s been said about yourself, your authors or your business online, you can use the -site: search operator to view information on other websites. For example, search for: Your name -site:yourwebsite.com

Social media accounts generally aren’t taken into account when looking at reputation, as they’re usually run by the organisation in question. But signals from these, such as reviews and comments, may be used.

Is the reputation you find showing you in a positive or negative light? Look for opportunities to build on this or fix some of the issues.

This example shows a search for British clothing brand Lucy & Yak. Once you scroll past the initial social media profiles, you’ll start to see sites which give more of an understanding of the brand’s reputation.

Moving forwards

E-E-A-T signals play a part in all websites – so even if you’re not hosting YMYL content, putting any of these elements into place will benefit your site.

If you’re managing YMYL content, then the bar is set that much higher, and you’ll need to find (and action!) opportunities to go above and beyond in order to demonstrate expertise and earn trust from Google – and your readers.

As Google clamps down on mass-generated content, and emphasises the need for originality and experience, this approach is only going to get more important in the years to come.

Need to get better results from search?

If you’re looking for an outside perspective to get your site pulling in more search traffic, we’d love to have a chat about how we can help! Get in touch via 📨 hello@heyyou.digital or 📞 01159902779 to have a chat.