If your website contains both YMYL, your money / your life, and non-YMYL topics of content, you may want to consider separating those out into their own standalone websites. Google's John Mueller implied that sometimes Google can do that automatically but it is safer to do it on your end so that you don't have to meet a specific E-A-T, expertise authority trustworthiness, threshold for the non YMYL content on that site.
The question came up at the 36:01 mark into Friday's video "If a website covers both YMYL, so your money or your life, topics as well as non-YMYL non-sensitive topics and for some reason we're unable to establish E-A-T, so kind of expertise, authority, trustworthiness in the eyes of Google algorithms, does the rank of all articles on the website get hit including the non-YMYL topics as well as where the required E-A-T score is relatively low to rank well or just those that belong to the YMYL category?"
John Mueller of Google said "it's always going to be challenging for Google's algorithms to figure out how to deal with that website. So regardless of anything around YMYL or EAT or anything, if you have this mix of very polar opposites almost with regards to content, then I would assume that Google's algorithms are always going to struggle with figuring out how how to rank your website."
John then explained about Google having your website "tip over," I guess tip the scales over to saying this website is either good or either bad. In the YMYL category, that scale will be more challenging whereas in the non-YMYL it won't be as challenging.
Glenn Gabe summed it up nicely in these tweets:
More from John: If you want to keep the mix of YMYL & non-YMYL content on one site, then you have to assume that Google's algorithms could have a hard time determining how to rank the site. https://t.co/Y0qV8zDbfq pic.twitter.com/rAKuFUULRz
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) April 12, 2021
Here is the video embedded at the start time:
Here is the transcript:
If a website covers both YMYL, so your money or your life, topics as well as non-YMYL non-sensitive topics and for some reason we're unable to establish E-A-T, so kind of expertise, authority, trustworthiness in the eyes of Google algorithms, does the rank of all articles on the website get hit including the non-YMYL topics as well as where the required E-A-T score is relatively low to rank well or just those that belong to the YMYL category?It's really hard to say. So we don't have an EAT score, so kind of first off. So it's not that we look at one metric and we say this is this is the score for the authoritativeness of your website overall. That's kind of one thing on the side.
The other thing is, I think if you have a website that covers very sensitive topics as well as very trivial topics. Then it's always going to be challenging for Google's algorithms to figure out how to deal with that website. So regardless of anything around YMYL or EAT or anything, if you have this mix of very polar opposites almost with regards to content, then I would assume that Google's algorithms are always going to struggle with figuring out how how to rank your website.
And it might be that they tip over and say oh this is actually a pretty good website overall and everything will rank better. It might be that it tip over and say oh actually there's a lot of really trivial useless stuff on this website, we will not rank it better. And it's also possible that we can figure out the kind of the the clear separation between those two areas and try to rank them individually but that's that's not guaranteed.
Snd so one place where the separation is often a little bit more visible is when it comes to adult content. If a website has adult content and kind of non-adult content or I don't know like more general content, and if we can recognize that there's a clear separation between those two areas based on the URL structure. For example if you have a subdomain or if you have a clear subdirectory for a specific type of content. Then it's possible that we can learn that this part of the website should be treated like this maybe with safe search and the other part is not treated with safe search but it's not guaranteed.
So essentially what i'm saying is if you really want to make sure that G treats these as completely separate websites, then you probably need to make them separate websites. If you do want to kind of keep this mix of very sensitive and very trivial content, like i'm probably exaggerating I don't know your website, then you'd kind of have to assume that Google's algorithms might go one way at one time, they might change your direction at some point over time, it might be that we can figure out the split between them but especially if there's no clear URL structure split across them, then it's very possible that we will just treat this as one website overall and not as some like completely separate areas.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
