Your Money or Your Life: sensitive content for people’s lives

Your Money or Your Life: for some years now this expression, often presented with the acronym YMYL, is at the center of Google’s attention and, as a result, worries all those who work in the field of SEO. In short, it defines and categorizes a specific typology of sites and, more precisely, of content, those that deal with sensitive issues that can affect the future of readers, where there is no space (or, at least, there should be) for unreliable and poorly useful information.

What YMYL means

Finance, health, safety, but also happiness, legal information, nutrition and so on: the types of YMYL content are multiple, because this definition includes all the arguments that can have an impact of any entity on the life and happiness of people.

With the July 2022 Quality Rater Guidelines update, however, Google has revolutionized the concept of YMYL by untying it from specific topics and thus making it more general. In fact, the document with guidelines that “help ensure that Search returns relevant results from the most reliable sources available,” which are updated periodically to always provide an accurate and precise reference, deals with YMYL in a very pointed way, clarifying what it means and which sites it affects (and reducing or eliminating reference to YMYL pages altogether).

“Pages on the World Wide Web cover a wide range of topics,” the guidelines now state, but some of these “present a high risk of harm because content on such topics could have a significant impact on people‘s health, financial stability or security or on the welfare or well-being of society as a whole.” And these are precisely the YMYL or “Your Money or Your Life” topics according to Google-which, therefore, no longer talks about “YMYL pages” but better explains in detail why a topic should be considered YMYL and, therefore, why related information can potentially harm people (or even society).

Your Money Your Life, Google’s new definition

More specifically, Google explains that YMYL topics fall within a spectrum, meaning that there is not just a black or white topic, but precisely a variety of shades within which a page dealing with the topic fits.

To assess whether the topic is clearly YMYL, certainly not YMYL, or “somewhere in between,” one must consider whether it may significantly impact or harm one or more of the following:

• The person who is directly viewing or using the content.
• Other people influenced by the person viewing the content.
• Groups of people or companies influenced by the actions of the people who viewed the content.

Compared to the past, the reference to “welfare and well-being” of society stands out, which is a key addition to the Quality Rater Guidelines 2022 and seem to hint at something much broader: this “umbrella” can only include, for example, conspiracy theories, which were also mentioned in previous editions of the guidelines, but also a wide and broad category of things that are impacting society today, such as misinformation about vaccines, false cures for diseases, or political or electoral issues that have seen the ramping up of misinformation campaigns in some countries.

How to identify a YMYL topic

With the guidelines, then, Google urges its quality raters to consider “sensitive” any topic that could potentially cause harm to anyone if the specific content is not accurate or reliable, going so far as to say th