What are Google’s “Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) Pages”?

Google’s Page Quality Rating Standards for YMYL

Google refers to some pages as “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL); pages that Google thinks could impact “a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety” and for which it wants to deliver not only relevant information but also correct information.

According to Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines, such pages include:

News and Current Events about important topics such as international news, business, politics and science news etc.;

Civics, Government and Law, which provide information to citizens about voting, government agencies, public institutions, social services, and legal issues etc.;

Finance, which offer financial advice or information regarding investment, taxes, retirement plans, loans, banking, insurance and especially pages that allow purchases or online money transfer etc.;

Shopping pages are ones that provide information or services related to purchasing of goods and services, especially those allowing online purchasing;

Health and Safety pages inform about medical issues, drugs, hospitals, emergency preparedness and dangerous activities etc.;

Groups of People pages are those that share information about or claims related to groups of people such as on race, ethnicity, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity; and

Other pages that include topics and information related to important aspects of people’s lives, such as nutrition, fitness, information on housing, education, and employment etc.

Google’s page quality rating standards for YMYL pages are very high due to their huge impact on people’s lives.

What are page quality rating standards?

These are standards by which Google evaluates “how well the page achieves its purpose”.

A human quality rater evaluates if the page achieves its purpose in the context of the whole website, as well as the search term for which the page appears. Raters consider the purpose of the website (or page), quality and amount of content, FAQs, links, brand citations, contact and customer services information, website reputation and most importantly, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (EAT) when measuring the quality of a page.

Google outlines its page quality rating standards in the Search Quality Guidelines to help raters rank pages — based on their quality — on its results page. The guidelines present the most essential factors that raters should consider when analyzing pages and provide a set of instructions that guide raters on how to make their assessments. This process is basically designed to check up on the ranking algorithm’s effectiveness in recognizing web page quality. The quality rating team informs Google on how to improve their algorithm based on their learning.

However, these guidelines can come in useful for SEOs as well, who can study them to ensure they understand what Google expects from top-ranking pages.

First published in Digital Marketing Company Dolocal UK website.