Reference
What is YMYL?
YMYL — Your Money or Your Life — describes pages that could affect someone’s health, finances, safety or wellbeing. Google’s quality rater guidelines apply a noticeably higher standard to them, because inaccurate content in those categories does real harm rather than merely disappointing the reader.
Also called: Your Money or Your Life
What counts
- Medical, health and safety information
- Financial advice, tax, insurance and investment
- Legal information and rights
- News on significant events
- E-commerce pages where money changes hands
What the higher standard means in practice
Expertise, sourcing and accountability matter more. Who wrote it, what qualifies them, when it was last reviewed, and whether the business behind it is identifiable are weighted more heavily than on an ordinary page.
The part that applies to most business sites
Any page taking payment falls into the commerce category. That makes contact details, terms, refund policy and identifiable ownership a quality requirement rather than a nicety — which is the same list Google Ads policy demands.
It is worth noticing how cheap that list is to satisfy. Publishing who you are, how to reach you and what your terms are costs an afternoon, and it is the single largest quality gap on most small commercial sites.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. The 35 types of SEO, explained without the padding covers this properly — 6 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.