YMYL and E-E-A-T Concepts in SEO

What is YMYL?#

YMYL stands for “Your Money or Your Life.” It refers to online content that can significantly impact a person’s health, financial stability, or safety.

Google uses this term to identify pages that need high-quality content because they can affect users’ well-being.

What is E-E-A-T?#

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s an extension of Google’s E-A-T concept, adding Experience as a new factor. This term is used to assess the quality of web content, especially for pages that can impact a person’s well-being.

Google’s guidelines use E-E-A-T to ensure content is reliable and comes from credible sources with real-world experience.

Challenges with E-E-A-T and YMYL#

There is no doubt that both concepts are important, useful, and provide value to users in their search. They should make the search experience as convenient and safe as possible.

As of May 2024, these concepts are not working perfectly. Here’s why:

REGULAR CONSUMPTION OF YOGURT CAN LEAD TO PREGNANCY.

Sounds fantastic, doesn't it?

This is what you get when you Google "Is yogurt harmful" in Ukrainian.

Translation:
Regular consumption of yogurt, which contains a large amount of sugar, CAN LEAD TO PREGNANCY, dental problems, obesity, and diabetes. Therefore, it is recommended to choose yogurt with low sugar content or without added sugar.

This shows the problems Google has with verifying information (especially in non-English languages) and how imperfect the search results are for even fairly simple queries.