YMYL
Your Money or Your Life — Google's classification for pages that can significantly impact a person's health, financial stability, safety, or well-being. Subject to the highest E-E-A-T scrutiny.
YMYL stands for "Your Money or Your Life." It is a category Google uses to classify pages whose content could significantly impact a person's health, financial stability, safety, or overall well-being. YMYL pages are held to the highest E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) standards because inaccurate or low-quality information in these areas could cause real harm to users.
Examples of YMYL topics
- Health: medical advice, mental health, nutrition, drug information
- Finance: investment advice, tax planning, banking, insurance, crypto
- Legal: legal advice, contracts, immigration, family law
- Safety: home safety, product safety, child safety, emergency preparedness
- Civic: government, voting, public policy, news
- Major life decisions: college, jobs, housing, adoption
Why YMYL matters for SEO
YMYL pages are subject to much higher quality scrutiny from Google's Quality Raters. A low-quality YMYL page is far more likely to be suppressed in rankings or flagged as misinformation. The "Medic Update" of August 2018 dramatically demonstrated this: many health and finance sites saw massive ranking drops because Google tightened YMYL quality standards.
How to do well on YMYL pages
- Hire credentialed authors (MD, JD, CPA, etc.) and display their qualifications
- Add detailed author bios and editorial review processes
- Cite authoritative sources (peer-reviewed studies, government sites, official institutions)
- Keep content up to date with visible "last updated" dates
- Add medical/financial/legal disclaimers where appropriate
- Use HTTPS and display contact information and ownership clearly
- Apply Person, Organization, and Article schema markup with sameAs links to authoritative profiles
Audit your YMYL pages with an E-E-A-T Signal Analyzer to identify which trust signals are missing.