YMYL (Your Money or Your Life)

What is YMYL?

YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life. This is a term that Google uses for content that can have a direct impact on users' well-being, health, safety, or financial situation. Think about topics such as medical advice, legal information, financial tips or news about major social themes.

Because these topics can have such a big impact, Google has much stricter quality criteria for. After all, an article with the wrong health information can have serious consequences for someone's life. That's why reliability, expertise, and citation are essential for YMYL content.

Examples of YMYL content

• medical: advice about symptoms, treatments or medications.
• Financially: mortgage advice, investments, taxes.
• juridical: explanation of legislation, contracts, rights and obligations.
• Safety: information about natural disasters, contingency plans or crime.
• News & Politics: articles that can influence public opinion or democracy.

In short, as soon as your content can have an impact on someone's life or money, Google sees it as YMYL.

Why is YMYL important for SEO?

For websites that fall into this category, it's crucial to pay extra attention to EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). Google sets the bar much higher here:

• Content must be written by experts or experts. SEO content by an SEO specialist, mortgage advice by a mortgage advisor and advice on nutrition from a specialist in that field.
• Transparency is mandatory: who is the author and why is he/she allowed to write about it? Link to the relevant page about the author, stay transparent.
• Reliable sources and scientific evidence are necessary. Link to major external sources for greater reliability.

A YMYL website without strong EEAT signals runs the risk of ranking poorly or even not being visible at all. Are you curious about what to do with EEAT in 2025, read this blog.

How do you score with YMYL content?

As an SEO specialist, I always recommend:

• Author pages to add with background information and qualifications. Link to the content writer, I do this myself by linking to my own page at a blog or term page.
• To be updated regularly, so that content stays up to date. Make sure that important pages are updated at least once every six months.
• Cite sources and studies, especially when it comes to medical or financial issues. Think of important and good external sources.
• External reviews and citations to be collected to substantiate reliability. Customer backlinks and reviews work well for this.

Conclusion

YMYL is one of the most critical parts of Google's quality guidelines. If you write about health, money or safety, your content should not only be easy to find, but above all safe and reliable. By investing in EEAT and transparency, you make your website future-proof and show that you take user trust seriously.