How to create and optimize YMYL content?

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If you run an online store or other business related to finance, security or health issues, you will be under the observation of Google algorithms, which pay special attention to content from the YMYL category ( Your Money Your Life ). Do the texts on your company blog or in the guide in the e-store belong to this group? If so, you should consider what this means to you and, above all, how to optimize them to meet the search engine criteria.

Where did the YMYL category come from?
Every day, Google indexes billions of new pieces of content. A large portion of this content is blog posts. According to data provided by Earth Wind, there are currently over 600 million blogs on the Internet, with 2 million in the United States alone [1]. This is an incredibly large number. However, just because a blog exists does not mean that it is regularly updated. Let's assume that of these 600 million blogs, at least 10% of them publish a new post every day. This is a huge amount of new content that needs to be indexed by Google.

Among the millions of new posts published daily, there are articles on various topics – from light lifestyle, culinary, and travel texts to science, finance, and politics. Due to the scale of the enterprise, Google is not able to focus on all of them evenly. Although it of course reviews and indexes all of them, not all content is treated with the same priority. To paraphrase Orwell: all content is important, but there is content that is more important than others. This brings us to the category of content defined by Google as YMYL.

What is YMYL content?
Under this name, which at first glance does not tell us much, there is the English acronym "Your Money Your Life". This means that this category includes all topics that directly concern human life. In addition to financial topics, these will also include issues affecting health - both physical and mental, safety, etc. As you can see, the definition of YMYL content is broad, because in practice many factors can affect our well-being or financial situation.

Search engine algorithms like Google pay special attention to this content. Why? Because – according to Google – lack of reliability, misleading or publishing false information in this category can have destructive consequences for the health, financial situation of a specific person, groups of people or even the entire society.

According to Google, these types of articles can cause harm in two different ways.

Harmful subject matter . This can be either the subject matter or the content. This category includes any content that could encourage negative behavior or harm someone as a result. This includes topics related to self-harm, crime, or extremism.
Inaccurate information. Harm can also be caused by misleading or any singapore phone number omitting information. The problem occurs when an article on an important topic, such as health, contains inaccurate information that is not confirmed by credible sources.
Is our content YMYL?
As you can see, the criteria and categories provided in Google's guidelines are quite general and imprecise. There are many factors in our environment that can potentially affect our well-being in many aspects. The situation is complicated by the fact that in this case, the topic criterion may not be enough. Sometimes it is the context that decides whether a topic is YMYL.
Fortunately, we do not have to wonder whether the topics discussed in our blog will fit into YMYL or not. The experts at Google provide us with a set of topic categories that they believe deserve such status. Here are a few that are often considered YMYL:

Health and medicine
Diagnosis and treatment of various diseases (e.g. cancer, diabetes)
Symptoms and first aid in emergencies (e.g. heart attack)
Prescription Drugs and Their Side Effects
Mental health (e.g. depression, anxiety disorders)
Finance and economics
Investing and Portfolio Management
Mortgages, Student Loans and Loans
Retirement planning
Taxes and tax reliefs
Law and security
Civil and electoral rights
Immigration Rules and Regulations
Online Security and Data Protection
Self-defense and personal safety
Social and political
Elections and electoral processes
Discrimination and human rights
Climate change and ecology
Health and education policies

As you can see, the range of topics is very broad and covers many areas of our lives. However, not every topic related to our daily activities has to fit into “Your Money Your Life”. So how will we know if we are dealing with this type of topic?

In this case, it is best to ask yourself two key questions:

Can the topic I am discussing negatively impact the mental, physical or financial health of a person or group of people?
Could any errors or inaccuracies in this article lead to significant deterioration in health or serious harm to an individual or group of people?
What to look for when creating YMYL content?
Google is particularly demanding when it comes to this type of content. It draws attention to how potential errors or omissions in a given topic may affect the health and functioning of a given person. It is not surprising that the bar is set much higher for this content than (according to Google) for less important entertainment news, the main topic of which is the latest celebrity scandal or a report from a movie premiere. YMYL-themed pages have higher standards than pages on topics other than YMYL. It is worth noting that we are talking about higher, not different criteria here. This means that when it comes to creating this type of content, we have to apply ourselves more and pay attention to elements that were not as important in other content. What is important?

The starting point, and in fact the most important criterion by which YMYL content is assessed, is the EEAT-based content rating system.

EEAT is an acronym for "Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness" .

It is important to note that EEAT is not a direct ranking factor, but a certain model for assessing the quality of a page. This model assumes that the first three elements of the acronym (experience, expertise, authority) are assessed, which ultimately make up the fourth, which is the credibility of a given website or article.

Google’s Danny Sullivan explained it simply : “While EEAT itself isn’t a specific ranking factor, it’s useful to use a combination of factors that can identify content with good EEAT. Reviewing the guidelines can help you assess how your content is performing from an EEAT perspective, what improvements you might want to make, and help you conceptually align with the various signals our automated systems use to rank content.”