E.A.T in YMYL Niches - Should We Worry?

Lloops

Lloops

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For those of us who run affiliate sites in YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) , should we be worried about the latest Google update?

Apparently, Google is demoting sites in YMYL niches where they don't have high/highest E.A.T (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust).

If this is nothing to worry about the feel free to tell me to STFU and keep on grinding - with so much buzz around the latest update, I just wanted to check if this is something to start thinking about?
 
I think the analysis is correct, but the cure (as usual) is obfuscated by snake oil salesmen aka consultants.

I see this update as about links, not soft "EAT" stuff.

I could be wrong of course.
 
@bernard that was very similar to what my initial thoughts were.

Everything I've read has made it seem like this is only a problem that can be solved with hour upon hour of consultation!

Surely once again this just comes down to getting relevant links from the authorities within your space.
 
I am looking at some sites that are not hit and they don't have any E.A.T stuff going on, no social profiles, no bio, none of that. I will still do some of that, for best practice reasons, but I doubt this does it alone.
 
bernard said:
I am looking at some sites that are not hit and they don't have any E.A.T stuff going on, no social profiles, no bio, none of that. I will still do some of that, for best practice reasons, but I doubt this does it alone.
Click to expand...

This is the problem with every algorithm change. There are always survivors that either slip under the radar or have enough of 'something else' to justify not whacking them. It makes it impossible to determine what got hit with too much confidence. All we can look at is the correlations. The Fred update was like this.

I also assume that they roll these out in phases and some of the survivors do end up getting popped later on after they get initial feedback from the SERP data.

I haven't had a chance to try to determine what this affected, but I can say that as it began rolling out I got a decent boost on commercial terms which was then rolled back to the normal level again. I'm not in the YMYL vertical though. I'm down around 6% organic traffic from last week, where I saw that as a boost.

I guess the real question is how does Google measure:
  • Expertise
  • Authoritativeness
  • Trust
I'd guess (winging it as I type) Expertise has to do with who links to you. Authoritativeness has to do with your content and who you link to and your SERP exposure and traffic other than organic. Trust likely has a lot to do with age and links. Authoritativeness and Trust both could boil down to things like "does this site have social media pages, contact pages with addresses and phone numbers" and things like that too.

With all these updates, whatever it ends up being that they targeted, we should just incrementally improve on those points while continuing to publish and get more links. Eventually you become bulletproof until they invent some new thing to be upset about, but in general you might see ups and downs all the while trending upwards. You might have to view your analytics over the course of 2 or 3 years to see it, but if you're doing things right it'll be there.

I also still think that if you do everything a real 'search oriented' business ought to be doing and not spamming, you should be pretty safe from every update. There will be fluctuations but you shouldn't get targeted and penalized by the algorithm. Sometimes its crap that's not easy to see coming if you never ran into it before, like Fred hitting sites that don't work the entire funnel. But if you put it in the context of "greed" then it was obvious.

I don't even know what I'm rambling about. If I learn anything about this update I'll report back.
 
I have 3 sites (health, hobby, home) and they all got hit. Not "penalized" hit in any way. Take my health site. It ranked 4th on the "condition" (one word) keyword. Now it ranks 9-10th. I get that. It's ok. Those sites taking the positions are legit, trustworthy sites, but.. they don't have good content.

I have 3000 words of highly useful content, which gave me 200+ comments within half a year from satisfied users.

I get it though. They want to make sure shit is legit. They left the smaller keywords (I see this across all sites), only the broad "all purpose keywords" are hit. I think I went up in some cases on buying keywords.

In any case, I get it, when it comes to health. I added sources to PubMed and the like, which I should have done a long time ago. I hope it might increase Trust.

The thing is, I also saw similar drops in ranking on my hobby site and home consumer site. Broad keywords "all purpose" dropping like stone. Review type keywords stay in place.

I conclude, if you want to rank for an "all purpose" keyword, then you should be E.A.T.

I also conclude, I did my content well, that's why I got hit. I outranked guys with several years on me and far more links. I take it as a positive. I did my content right, but now I need some other signals (links, legit-ness).
 
My health site seems to be ok so far.
I am certainly no expert in my niche apart from suffering from the condition myself, so I do talk about my own experiences and it is my picture on the About page.
I don't even really have any good links to speak of and certainly very low scores on things such as TF or DA.

These updates are all very hit-and-miss it seems.
 
The site I sold back in 2016 is in one of these niches and it's been BARELY updated by the new owners...with very minimal link building.

It's only gained strength since I've sold it. It lacks EAT in most regards, has automated social profiles, and gets one or two new blog posts per month.

Yet, it ranks #2 for a brand term for a company in which it reviews (read: "company name" not "company name review") that gets 120,000 searches each month. This one keyword alone is worth about $30k in revenue each month using the old conversion data I have from the site.

And.. that one page ranks for 500+ keywords. I wouldn't be surprised if that one page makes like $50k+ a month now for them. That's before even evaluating all of the other money pages on the site and the keywords they rank for as well.

Needless to say that great content + solid link signals + solid technical SEO = long term, stable rankings.

I would venture to say that E.A.T. only comes into play when you're deficient in one or more of those factors.
 
I think algorithm changes like this are Google's way of making sure everyone gets a fair share of organic search traffic at some point.

Think of it , there are hundreds of websites in every niche competing for just 10 positions out of which , only top 3 (or maybe 5) positions will actually get you good traffic.

Its only natural for them to make occasional changes to the algorithm in order to "reward previously undervalued content" , as they say.

The truth is , with every algorithm update , there will always be winners and losers. Sometimes the winners are truly deserving of their reward while other times it may be that the bad guy just got lucky.

However , whatever hat you are (White , grey , e.t.c) , so long as you are totally reliant on free search traffic , you are at the mercy of big algorithm changes like this irrespective of how "white hat" you think your site is.

These days i don't even get excited about google rankings anymore knowing fully well i don't own the platform and have no control. Google might just wake up one morning and not like my face anymore for no good reason ; after falling in love with me for 3 years.

Its funny how years of hard work can be wiped out by a single update ; at the click of a button.

So I just enjoy the moment , make the $$ i can , try to protect the asset but whatever happens , happens.

Perhaps the best way to truly stay safe is to treat your website as a real business , cut down over dependence on search traffic and do real marketing. Build a brand.

Its tough , but can be done......And you get to sleep better at night.

Anyways , Here is a recently published article about this update by Glen Gabe. You may find it useful

https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/august-1-google-algorithm-update-analysis-and-findings/
 
Encrypted said:
Perhaps the best way to truly stay safe is to treat your website as a real business , cut down over dependence on search traffic and do real marketing. Build a brand.
Click to expand...


This.

My new site is spending significant time and resources on building out operations guides for various traffic gen methods.

We're doing Organic Search, Social (FB, Twitter, Pinterest, Insta), and Email.

Organic is using 100% white hat SEO methods that I'm doing myself - not outsourcing.

All social platforms have individual strategies that are tested for 60 days, refined, and then tested again for another 60 days before being considered "done."

We are also going to be hiring an email marketing expert to help us build segmented lists for each category of our site, drive traffic and opt-ins to each, and set up autoresponder series targetting each segment.

We may take hits in Organic over time... but we'll never be left wanting for traffic and revenue once all this is humming.
 
Basically the problem is people are still skating on the edge.

The right strategy I've always believed is to look at where the penalties are - eg after Panda - what's the minimum standard of content that wasn't penalised then be WAY WAY better than that. So you're far away from the precipice all the time.

The quality bar is always rising - more good sites, more competition, more pressure on Google to give the best sites slots at the top while taking real estate for themselves. People used to cut search engines some slack if they ended up on page 3, now we (rightly probably) expect to get something sensible for our query on page 1 100% of the time and preferably most of page 1 most of the time.

So looking at the best links people have, and thinking how can I be way ahead of that. Thinking of the best UX someone has. Thinking of the best content someone has... and so on. And if you can't do that at least be WAY WAY better than where the new line in the sand is. So when the next one is drawn you're still WAY better.

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Here's a site (not mine/not a client) I used to chat to the head of SEO at quite often a few years back. They got hit by a penalty taking them from 1m to 400k. Note how the stuff they did to improve their content quality and move WAY WAY ahead and start growing again (it took ages - it's a huge site and they have a lot of content) actually served them well when this update came, it moved them further up with a little boost come August (1.7M to 1.9M).

Getting better all the time, and always chasing the best is the right strategy, not figuring out what the minimum quality you can do to rank is.

Also people get frustrated/give up too soon when these updates happen. Not trying to say we should all try to save a site that made us $1k/mo and now makes $400/mo - obviously the example above is a much more successful site than that financially so was worth the grind. But I've had a few friends share graphs with me like this as if their side project had been annihilated:

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Yeah that sucks and yeah you've lost some % of growth you got from hard work you put in. But it's likely you just weren't keeping far enough ahead of the game. That line in the sand just started to chip away at you. But you're still just taking a little kick - back to the start of the year or whatever.

The article @Calamari shared covers it beautifully - keep on trucking and improving - don't just sit about and do nothing or the slide will just continue.
 
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Yeah.

The problem is that "way way" ahead is difficult within the confines of affiliate marketing money pages.

I've been thinking about strictly separating info from commerce content, have almost all product be at a "shop" page and link there (with autofiltering).
 
bernard said:
The problem is that "way way" ahead is difficult within the confines of affiliate marketing money pages.
Click to expand...

The first graph I posted is a pure affiliate site :wink:. They're super smart and have a decent-sized content team but... sometimes that's your competition. So it definitely can be done.

To be more helpful though - check out @NickEubanks post over here - https://ftf.agency/ecommerce-content/ - a lot of what he's talking about for ecommerce (particularly towards the end where he showcases some 'content on a sales page' ideas) can easily be applied to affiliate pages too.
 
Did anyone else notice that this update seems to be a Panda like refresh?

Pages added up until about a month before the update were simply not affected for me.
 
How are you guys doing?

I seem to bounce back close to or better where I was before.

Not all keywords, not all the time, lots of bouncing up and down now, but there seems to be something happening.

Difficult to say what's the reason, I did both an EAT update and deep linking.

I will have an opportunity to see it more clearly, cause I massively content upgraded a very under performing landing page, without doing any linking.
 
My main site has really come back, my smaller health niche site got hit again.

I've done several things on my main site, so difficult to tell what is the direct reason:

Updating contact information
Privacy stuff update
Social media accounts
Content upgrade
 
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