YMYL question

A couple of things I'd love to clarify:

1) One of my clients have a software development and design services business. And I wanted to know if running this type of business and having blog articles like "software development process", "how much software development cost" considered as YMYL content?

2) After a sequence of the recent Google updates (Core update, helpful product update, etc.) in 2022, I've got a strong feeling that E-A-T started to apply as a ranking factor to a wider range of websites (aka Google expanded the list of pages considered as YMYL content). The reason is because the client mentioned above has a blog with really high quality articles but it still lost a lot of traffic starting Sep 13, 2022. My assumption is because we didn't have 'author', 'byline', 'address', 'contact us' and other elements on the blog articles. I though these things are not critical for software dev and design business blog. Please let me know if it can be the reason for losing a lot of positions during the recent G updates?

Please let me know your thoughts.

1) nope

YMYL content is content that life depends on (according to google, which is a biased assumption in my opinion), and YMYL content is usually related to health, finances, relationships, environmental catastrophes, news, government related content, law / legal related content, society related content, etc..

There was a list shared here on the forum some while ago that listed all niches that fall into YMYL, but I don't think I can find it cause I'm not going to search for it too thoroughly. But I think you can google this stuff anyway, there has to be some list in google that mentions all YMYL niches

2) it's possible. I've not heard of these updates enforcing EAT harder, but knowing google I can totally see this being the case

curious_ said:

I though these things are not critical for software dev and design business blog

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they're not

curious_ said:

Please let me know if it can be the reason for losing a lot of positions during the recent G updates?

Click to expand...

it could very well be the reason if any of the updates has put emphasis on EAT, but like I said, I've not heard of this being the case yet. If you know this being the case, could you please provide link to a source?

If you know when your client's traffic had started plummeting you can get an idea of which update affected him / her and work on that

EAT is always relevant regardless your site is YMYL

The big question is which factors are involving EAT? For the crawler part, links are the biggest part. Schema is a thing also because ultimately Google is creating a database of authoritarian entities. Expertise is something more subjective and is widely unknown how is Google is finding this, probably from a ML model based on content similaity from already authoritative sources. But I'm not 100% confident of this, much testing is required. Trust = Reputation. Reputation is build mostly with not contextual links. So basically both Authority and Trust and Reputation are build through links.

Focus on your linkbuilding although keep everything congruent and clean in terms of the authorship of your content including schema, if possible. Although as I said this is completely unknown nowadays and there are hundreds of millions of pages highly ranking for very powerful highly competitive keywords with an author like: "(Newspaper/Magazine name) Newsroom/Publisher/whatever" as the author.

Thank you for the detailed answers!

tazarbm said:

If you know when your client's traffic had started plummeting you can get an idea of which update affected him / her and work on that

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My client’s website started plummeting on Sep 13 and continues to drop. what would you recommend looking at first?

the client website is a software design and dev agency.

curious_ said:

Thank you for the detailed answers!

My client’s website started plummeting on Sep 13 and continues to drop. what would you recommend looking at first?

the client website is a software design and dev agency.

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I would look into Google's Helpful Content Update. Are you creating content that's helpful or is it just to optimize for keywords?

I had a site plummet 50 positions because all of the content was written to rank in Google and not to actually help people.

I'm not sure how tf they detected it, but they did.

Meanwhile I have a surgeon whos been getting demolished by larger sites, finally took some positioning from them due to his content being very helpful and actually more conversational than the bigger sites.

On another note

YMYL affects any site collecting any form of payment. If you collect payments, you need EAT.

curious_ said:

Thank you for the detailed answers!

My client’s website started plummeting on Sep 13 and continues to drop. what would you recommend looking at first?

the client website is a software design and dev agency.

Click to expand...

so, according to this page precisely on the 13th of September there's been a "product structured data" update:
https://developers.google.com/search/updates
Have a read and see what has changed and what google recommends that you do. Also, check the pages that have lost rankings and compare them to the competitors that are sitting in the first 3-4 positions and see how your client's (de-ranked) pages compare to those of the competitors and see if you can replicate anything that your client's competitors do that your client doesn't.

Unfortunately, I can't provide more / better tips than these, hopefully they can pinpoint you in the right direction. Good luck!