What Are E-A-T and YMYL? And Do They Impact SEO?

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Today’s question comes from Kayla.

What is E-A-T and YMYL? And do they impact SEO?

OK, E-A-T, stands for “expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. YMYL stands for “Your Money or Your Life.”

These are both concepts that come from Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines.

And these guidelines are used to train human quality raters that work outside Google.

Their entire job all day is to just review websites in accordance with these particular factors.

Now…what does this mean in terms of SEO?

Well…really…absolutely nothing.

So Google is on record on multiple occasions saying that the Google Quality Raters Guidelines do not have any impact on SEO at all.

OK, so but…”I have had a number of people say that Google takes E-A-T and YMYL into account and they even talk as if there is a- some sort of a framework or E-A-T score.

And they have even referenced the fact that Google says to work on improving your E-A-T.”

Well, in one respect, that’s true- Google says to improve your E-A-T.

But they also say on that same page where they say to improve your E-A-T, they also talk about the fact that Google’s quality raters have zero impact on rankings in the algorithm.

So what this means is that E-A-T and YMYL, these are just concepts.

It’s like saying that if you were to improve your “ooga booga” as opposed to E-A-T, it basically means the same thing.

It’s a conceptual framework.

So just by focusing on, say, E-A-T or YMYL, you might hit a few good factors randomly speaking, but it would pale in comparison to what you would get if you had a targeted SEO campaign that focused on improving things like content, improving things like links and improving the quality of your technical SEO.

If you’re not focusing on those three things, then you’re not really doing SEO, you’re doing “ooga booga” or whatever you want to call that based on the specific E-A-T and YMYL framework.

But you might be asking: “But I saw a video from Danny Sullivan and he was talking about E-A-T,” if you’re referring to this video right here…

Here, he is just talking about Google Discover and Google News.

That has no impact on the overall Google ranking algorithm.

And here in this particular help article from Google, they also say that the Quality Raters Guidelines have zero impact on rankings.

So, yes, it’s really…it’s really a clear answer here.

E-A-T and YMYL are a framework for saying something to the effect of let’s improve E-A-T by working on improving content, improving your links, improving the quality of your technical SEO, stuff like that.

It is not an E-A-T score or anything like that at all.

That’s it for today’s Ask an SEO episode 9.

This is Brian Harnish signing off. Have a great day!!