Google’s John Mueller was asked if energy supply types of websites would fall into the YMYL, your money – your life, category and thus have to hold to a higher standard for E-A-T concepts. John said, he doesn’t have an “absolute answer” because Google does not have categories “hard-coded in the algorithms.”
John said “I don’t know. So I think for things like this on the one hand, we don’t have this like hard-coded in the algorithms, that we try to look at for these specific kinds of pieces of content. So it’s it’s not something where we would have an absolute answer.”
What John is saying that it isn’t straight forward to say that a site about energy supply for the household or telecommunications supply for the household would fall into the YMYL category.
What is interesting is that John said you can test it with your users. He said “you can ask users directly or you can do like a small user study or where you could do maybe A/B testing on your website. Where you have some of your content with an author or some of it without an author and you just kind of see like from almost like a natural point of view do users react differently to this content and based on that make make your decision.”
The author bit here really does stand out to me.
He also suggested that you “look at the the quality rater guidelines and see what kind of sites they’re talking about there.” If you think your content falls into those categories, then it might.
This question came up at the 51:07 mark into the video, here is the embed:
Forum discussion at YouTube Community.
