What You Need to Know About Google’s New Site Standards
Google recently released the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, a 160 page document intended to help Google ranking engineers understand what they should be looking for in a website and why. While the document may be too much for most people to read through, it does offer excellent insight into how to make high-quality web pages. If you don’t have time to read the document, never fear! Adventure Web is here to explain the most important aspects: EAT and YMYL.
What You Need to Know About Google’s New Site Standards
YMYL
“Your Money or Your Life” is the theory Google uses to describe content that is high quality and could have an effect on a reader’s happiness, health, or wealth. A few examples might include banking pages, financial advice pages, and any page that offers medical or legal advice. YMYL pages face higher quality standards than other pages because it is so important that their content offers factually correct information and Google expects these types of pages to be written by industry experts. Any YMYL page that is found to contain spotty or incorrect information will be down-rated by Google.
EAT
E-A-T stands for “expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness” and is also in place to ensure that pages offer useful content. Google has been moving toward favoring expert content over shallow information that simply skims the surface and EAT takes that a step further. The Guidelines outline that all content must demonstrates high levels of EAT. How much expertise is needed depends on the type of content. For articles about high-stakes information such as finance, health, and law, content should be written by industry experts to avoid being down-rated. For articles on topics such as health and beauty, fashion, and humor, high levels of EAT should still be present but the pages do not need to be written by experts.
To learn more about how Google is changing the way they rank sites, tune into AHA Business Radio tonight from 6-7 pm on CBS Sports Radio 1300 AM when our own Gina Ramsey, VP of Digital Media, will tell you what you need to know to make your content competitive.
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