What You Should Know About YMYL in SEO
What does YMYL mean when improving a business’s SEO?
Google crawls and indexes millions of different business pages every single day of the week. This can range from a page explaining the best fishing rods to buy in 2025, through to the best hypercars available right now. Therefore, the amount of content marketing indexed by Googlebot is colossal.
Some of these pages indexed by Googlebot might be about celebrity gossip, thus deemed as low-importance pages that won’t significantly impact your life. These pages are often considered enjoyable reading, such as articles about the latest celebrity wedding.
YMYL pages, however, are entirely different. The abbreviation stands for “Your Money, Your Life”. This basically means there will be pages on Google that you use to make life-changing decisions. For example, advice about the divorce process, which mortgage to choose, or which pension pot is best suited for you.
These decisions are pivotal to your life; they shape your future and influence your life significantly. Therefore, many of the best SEO agencies globally believe that Google applies far more scrutiny to ensure the accuracy of these pages. Google therefore uses Google E-E-A-T and YMYL updates to check if the page is of high quality or not. Additionally, Google wants to ensure the information is up-to-date and accurate. Many SEO companies believe Google employs the semantic web for this purpose.
Google is thought to use its Google Knowledge Vault to check the accuracy of facts.
Valuable, Trustworthy, and Relevant Information
Google simply wants to provide the best possible answer to any question asked, whether it’s about the best local Greek restaurants or the best dentist in a particular area. Google’s algorithms assess how relevant, trustworthy, and accurate an answer is. Google uses E-E-A-T alongside over 200 ranking factors to determine the quality of a page. If a page falls into the YMYL category, Google applies additional scrutiny to ensure the content is accurate.
In short, Googlebot crawls and indexes countless different pages daily, providing a wide range of business advice. However, certain pages are more important, especially when shoppers make significant life decisions based on the information provided—such as selecting the best mortgage. These pages fall under the YMYL category.
These pages are therefore much more closely scrutinized by Google’s algorithm to ensure all the information is accurate. Hence, Google uses not just the Google E-E-A-T update to assess page quality but also applies additional YMYL considerations.
aims to provide the best possible answer to any question asked, whether it’s about the best local Greek restaurants or the best dentist in a specifict is YMYL?
“Your Money or Your Life” was an important update rolled out by Google.
Spam
There will always be businesses trying to persuade you to buy their products or services, even though their content marketing may be inaccurate or misleading. Google has become very efficient at removing these pages by eliminating them from its index.
Google is constantly battling spam and has used updates like Google Panda, for example, to remove numerous spam pages. Part of this involves removing pages that provide misleading information. Google is now better equipped to check facts and ensure all information is accurate, using the Google Knowledge Vault and Google’s algorithm.
Which Types of Pages are Thought to be Impacted by Google’s “Your Money or Your Life” Update?
- News and current events
- Pages providing health advice
- Finance-related topics
- Government pages
Why Does YMYL Matter in SEO?
YMYL matters because if an SEO agency is working for a client operating within the YMYL sector, they must ensure their content marketing is written to a very high standard. This is because Google scrutinizes the accuracy of content marketing using Google E-E-A-T. If the content is inaccurate or poorly written, it simply won’t get indexed. Therefore, marketing companies and copywriters must ensure their work is accurate and well-written.
Misleading content published by businesses is likely not to get indexed at all. For example, some businesses may try to mislead consumers by exaggerating a product’s effectiveness, such as a hair growth product. If these claims are inaccurate, the page might not get indexed.
Additionally, Google’s E-E-A-T makes it challenging for a business to build authority and obtain backlinks if the information provided about a product is misleading or false. Without quality backlinks, the page won’t rank highly in Google’s search results. Thus, incorrect or misleading information could prevent indexing due to the YMYL update and further limit rankings due to insufficient backlinks.
How Can You Use E-E-A-T to Improve Your YMYL Content?
You must use E-E-A-T to improve content marketing as well. Your content marketing needs to demonstrate real-life experience and expertise. You also need to enhance authority by building backlinks and obtaining quality business reviews.
Good Quality Copywriters are Needed
When you speak to digital marketing agencies, they’ll often tell you the top marketing companies employ the best copywriters. Even though artificial intelligence can now write a blog post in seconds, journalists and high-quality copywriters are still essential for creating original, high-quality content, which typically ranks better on Google.
Cite Your Sources
Similar to writing a dissertation at university, Google’s algorithm evaluates how accurate and well-researched a page is. Therefore, linking to your sources is an excellent way to improve the quality of your business’s content marketing.
Come to One of the Best SEO Agencies in Bristol
We have been around for a very long time, and have helped many businesses reach the first page, whether they are based in Bristol or Bath.
We always use the best white-hat methods, and our content marketing is consistently high quality. Regardless of the sector your business operates in, we can help improve your search engine optimisation.
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