YMYL and E-E-A-T: how Google judges medical websites

Transcript

Google's search quality rater guidelines describe how it wants results judged, and almost every hospital page falls into the strictest category.

Here is what that means in practice.

Y-M-Y-L stands for Your Money or Your Life: topics that could significantly affect a person's health, finances or safety.

Medical pages are the clearest example, so they are held to the highest standard.

E-E-A-T stands for four qualities.

Experience.

Expertise.

Authoritativeness.

And trust, which the guidelines call the most important, because the other three feed into it.

The failures are unglamorous.

Clinical content credited to Team or Admin, with no reviewer.

Superlatives no independent source supports.

No visible review date.

And an off-site reputation that contradicts what the site says.

Raters are told to check.

Named authors, named clinical reviewers, review dates, sources and a correction process.

It is not a layer you add at publish time.

The full guide, with sources, is on gauravphogat.com.

The link is in the description.