In case you missed it, Google recently release an update to their Search Quality Rating Guidelines.
These are the guidelines that they provide to their evaluators who assess the quality of Google’s search results and provide them with feedback. The evaluators base their ratings on these guidelines.
While previous versions of the guidelines have been leaked, this represents the first time that Google officially released them.
Jennifer Slegg has shared some of her initial thoughts at The SEM Post and Moz.
We're still combing through this latest update. As we do, we'll likely post our opinions as they relate to lawyers. One section that has persistent relevance:
2.3 Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) Pages
Some types of pages could potentially impact the future happiness, health, or wealth of users. We call such pages “Your Money or Your Life” pages, or YMYL. The following are YMYL pages:
Shopping or financial transaction pages: webpages which allow users to make purchases, transfer money, pay bills, etc. online (such as online stores and online banking pages).
Financial information pages: webpages which provide advice or information about investments, taxes, retirement planning, home purchase, paying for college, buying insurance, etc.
Medical information pages: webpages which provide advice or information about health, drugs, specific diseases or conditions, mental health, nutrition, etc.
Legal information pages: webpages which provide legal advice or information on topics such as divorce, child custody, creating a will, becoming a citizen, etc.
Other: there are many other topics which you may consider YMYL, such as child adoption, car safety information, etc. Please use your judgment.
We have very high Page Quality rating standards for YMYL pages because low quality YMYL pages could potentially negatively impact users’ happiness, health, or wealth.
"YMYL" shows up 64 times throughout this most recent version of the guidelines. I encourage you to parse through the entire document to understand these types of pages in various quality rating contexts. Here are a few basic takeaways:
Hopefully, much of this is obvious to you. But if you're still trying to "game Google" with pages designed to catch search queries, don't be surprised when those tactics work less of the time.
Is Google perfect? Of course not. In fact, they have a long way to go. But you ought to consider the purpose of your pages. Are they designed for short-term search success? Or are you interested in building a long-term web presence and assets that will earn meaningful attention over many years?
If you answered the latter, it's time to stop acting like we're dealing with search engines from 1997.
Here's a recent Google SERP for "𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗿 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗹𝗮𝘄𝘆𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗽𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗽𝗵𝗶𝗮." Ads? ❌LSAs? ❌Local Pack? ❌Links? ❌ 🔷 AI Overview? ✅ 6 firms listed. Only one tiny 🔗. Click the 𝗦𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 button? 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗴𝗲𝘁: Here's a more detailed look at some of these firms: THE PEARCE LAW FIRM, P.C.Edith Pearce, […]
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