Tag Archive for: Google SEO

Google Quality Standards

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Google released their search quality evaluator guidelines back in 2015, which has since then become available for every marketer out there. Today, these guidelines show how google looks at the web pages and how they rank content by high to low quality. Here’s what you need to know about EAT, YMYL, and beneficial purpose in 2022. 

Since its release, the guidelines have been updated 3 times, recently in October of 2021. It’s important to remember that search quality evaluator guidelines can only guide us to where we need and want to go. Think of it as more of a roadmap opposed to an answer key.

Beneficial Purpose

What is the concept of beneficial purpose and what does it mean for us marketers who handle SEO? Beneficial purpose essentially is the purpose of the internet – more importantly, the purpose of websites and web pages. Websites and their respected pages are created to help their users. 

By understanding the purpose of the page you’ll be able to better understand what criteria goes into evaluating that page for quality. The overall goal of this is to ensure that the page is created to help users. Here’s a couple examples of what a high quality “user-centered” web page should look like: 

  • Sharing information about a specific topic
  • Sharing personal/social information
  • Sharing photos, videos and other media
  • Expressing opinions or point of views
  • Entertaining users
  • Selling products or services

Overall, beneficial purpose plays an important role for your users. Your site and content should have some sort of ussr-focused purpose that benefits them at the end of the day.

YMYL: Your Money or Your Life Content

Your Money or Your Life content is the type of information that can directly impact the reader’s happiness, health, safety, or financial stability. When you create a YMYL page with bad advice or misinformation it can affect your users’ lives. Google takes content seriously when it comes to spreading bad advice. Here are a couple of examples of YMYL topics:

  • News and current events – advice and information on  business, politics, science, technology. It’s important to use your judgment and knowledge of your locale.
  • Civics, government, and law – advice and information over voting, government agencies, social services and legal issues.
  • Finance – financial advice and information over taxes, retirement planning, loans, banking, insurance.
  • Shopping – information about goods and services, essentially allowing people to make purchases online.
  • Health and Safety – advice and information about medical issues, drugs, and hospitals.
  • Groups of people – advice and information on groups of people such as race, ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, sexual orientation.

While there are many YMYL topics, the quality evaluators that google uses have to use their judgment to determine whether a page qualifies as YMYL content.

E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness

Once a page has determined its beneficial purpose, its level of E-A-T is considered in terms of whether the content is YMYL. Non-YMYL content doesn’t require the same severity as YMYL content.

The E in E-A-T stands for: Expertise 一 It refers to the creator of the main content on a web page. The expert must have credentials to back up the content on the website. People with relevant life experience in the topics that are being covered on the web page can be considered experts—no formal training or education required. However, this only holds true for non-YMYL content.

The A in E-A-T stands for: Authoritativeness 一 This refers to the content that appears on the website. Authoritativeness stands for people knowing your background and seeing you as a leader. 

The T in E-A-T stands for Trustworthiness 一 This refers to the creator, content and website. Being trustworthy means people can trust the information you provide. You’re credible as a good source for providing information.

Here are a couple of topics that require high E-A-T:

  • Medical advice
  • Journalism/news stories
  • Science topics
  • Financial, legal, and tax advice
  • Hobbies: such as photography, playing piano 

Final Thoughts

In order to create high quality ranking content, you should incorporate Beneficial Purpose, E-A-T and YMYL to your marketing strategy. Like anything else, Google is constantly changing their strategies. To stay on top of the curve, you should be adjusting your strategy along with their changes in order to stay relevant in your industry.

As Google Partners, Onimod Global has over a decade of experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, social media advertising, content marketing and paid search. Got questions about Google strategies or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

SEO Performance & Moving Your Website Host

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Here’s a little known secret: many people are afraid to switch their web hosts. But eventually your once state-of-the-art website will begin to lag in performance and speed. However, it is important to be aware of the value of updating your web host and the difference it makes for your site. Read on to find out why. 

When you’re in the process of optimizing your web pages your goal is to have your content rank high on a search engine, like Google. Ideally, you want your content at the top of a search engine’s results for keywords relevant to your product or services.

Changing the location of your website hosting can impact its performance in search results. It may sound a little scary at first when your website hosts are slow but don’t panic – the rankings will come back!

Here’s what you should know about changing your website host location.

Google Slowing Down Your Website

The first thing you will notice when you move your host location is that your website is slow, perhaps extremely slow. Rest assured, this isn’t something that will stay that way for long. Google makes your website slow when they notice a change in host. They do this so Google won’t cause any problems in the future.

Whether you’re moving to a hosting provider in the same location, or a new location, Google will be cautious with how much it crawls the site. Over time, once Google’s systems can tell that going faster doesn’t cause any issues, they’ll speed up again. This is independent of the kind of hosting change you make. It doesn’t make a difference if you’re moving to a different provider down the road, or moving to another country.

Impact on Website Loading Times

There are a couple of different scenarios that are at play if you’re thinking about moving your website. If you’re thinking about moving your website hosting to a new location, this can have an impact on how fast your website will load for your users. If a majority of users live far away from where the website is hosted, it could lead to a slower user experience. 

In turn, that could affect the speed and page experience ranking factors. Depending on how strongly this is visible, that can play a role in speed and the page experience ranking factor for a website.

Hosting Your Website in Multiple Locations

To avoid the likelihood of your website loading time being affected, you could host your website on servers in multiple locations. Content delivery networks, also known as (CDNs) often do this, and depending on the hosting platform you’re using your site may be on multiple servers already.

If you’re using a hosting platform the chances of them already doing this for you is high. With SEO, the server’s location is unfortunately not used for geo-targeting. If you want your website to target users in a specific location, you would need to use either the country-code top level domain, or the appropriate setting in Google Search Console.

A country-code top-level domain is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. The appropriate setting in the Google Search Console can be found in the international targeting report in your settings. 

  • Use the International Targeting report to monitor your hreflang errors, or to choose a country that should be prioritized for your search results. This report has the following sections:
  • The Language section: Monitor the usage and errors of hreflang tags on your site. 
  • The Country section: Set a site-wide country target for your entire site, if desired.

Final Thoughts

Overall, changing the location of your website host will temporarily impact crawling on your website, and has the potential to impact loading time. It’s important to remember that this type of change will not impact SEO when it comes to geo-targeting.

At Onimod Global, our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success. Our mission is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success. We have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing.

We have a preferred hosting vendor that boosts SEO performance. If you’d like to learn more about our hosting vendor and our services contact us today!