Google Medic Update Rewards Expertise-Authority-Trust (E-A-T).
Across many years, the Google Algorithm has undergone many updates, some major and some relatively minor. While it’s necessary to appreciate changes are made on a daily basis to the core algorithm, there has been, throughout the journey of improving search results, changes that have been significant. This is one such update.
Google’s mission is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Content is therefore at the core of Google’s philosophy. So much so, the search engine giant often uses the phrase “Content Is King”. It always has been and always will be!
However, before major updates to the algorithm, notably ‘Panda‘, ‘Penguin‘, ‘Pigeon‘, ‘Mobile‘ and ‘Page Speed‘, a significant problem was the quantity of inbound links, social media referrals and articles in blogs ranked pages in search engine result pages (SERP) higher than smaller volumes of these, even though the quality was significantly higher.
This, fortunately has changed over the years, with an increased focus on rewarding good quality webpages in SERP as well as penalising poor quality pages and websites.
Google Medic Update continues this focus applying a rating for the quality of different webpages based on a number of factors.
- The ‘Purpose’ of the Page
- Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness (E-A-T)
- Main Content Quality and Amount
- Website Information, that is information about who is responsible for the main content as well as the creator of the main content
- Website Reputation, the reputation about who’s responsible for the main content
To assist SEO experts, like Nigel Brookson, Google released “Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines” to let webmasters know what Google considered to be ‘good quality’ and what they’ve isolated as bad content on webpages when making the determination of how webpages are ranked in SERP.
Websites affected the most (42% of them) from this update were in the health and medical sectors, hence the update was named ‘Medic’.
Websites set up by ‘bloggers’ with no medical credentials, no expertise, authoritativeness and had no trustworthiness but were promoting dubious medicines, either directly or through advertising were hit the hardest.
Another ‘Google quality rating’, “Your Money or Your Life” looks at webpages that dispense life-affecting advice. These pages are held to the highest standard and don’t just apply to the health and medical sectors, but include advise given that could potentially impact the future happiness, financial stability, or safety of users.
While many ‘YMYL’ pages were impacted by the ‘Medic Update’, all pages, were affected by ‘E-A-T’.
If your website contains ‘YMYL’ content, the pages should show they’re authored by qualified experts in the field. The scope of ‘YMYL’ is extremely wide, covering building and other trades, legal an other professions that lay-people would be expected to seek guidance about because it has great potential to impact someone’s life.
Quality Content Guidelines Summary
The following lists some simple guidelines that help website pages meet the criteria of the Google Medic Update, specifically with regards to ‘YMYL’ and ‘E-A-T’.
- Expertly-written content
- Plentiful visual elements of images, videos, and/or illustrations
- Structured content in the form of: tables of contents, headers, bullet points, pull quotes, and metadata
- A good number of ‘dofollow’ outbound links (external links) to high quality, relevant sources for reference
- Author Bio and Author Markup to link a real person to the page
- Website ‘About Page’ should contain author and company information, with history and experience data for both
Expert copywriters from Thinking IT are invaluable in writing copy for websites that experts in their field then read over for accuracy. All information is factual and referenced, with included citations given where appropriate to increase the ‘E-A-T’ score.
Design Factors Affected By ‘Google Medic Update’
While the update focused on specific aspects of content, it’s important a web page has a ‘user friendly design’ (UX design), meaning visitors enjoy engaging with it and can receive as much information from it as possible in the shortest amount of time.
Design elements to consider include:
- Plenty of white space to increase readability
- Use of structured data, such as headlines (h1, h2, h3,h4 where appropriate), numbered lists, bullet point lists, tables and blockquotes
- Include other non-text visual elements such as images, videos, coloured blocks
- Easily clickable links and targets such as buttons
Note: Thinking IT‘s graphic design studio can create all the graphic images required to put your message across.
SEO Factors Affected By ‘Google Medic Update’
There were many sites outside of the 42% of health and medical websites most affected by a drop in ranking position in SERP. Sites that performed best had the following attributes:
- Better ‘on page’ factors, primarily with regards to ‘relevancy’ i.e. satisfying what the purpose of pages and articles were
- Correct number and frequency of keywords contained in HTML areas to avoid ‘keyword stuffing’ of search terms
- Good number of quality links from third-party websites with high TrustRank
The volume, or amount of these articles is important, but quality will trump quantity, so these should be as well written as the ‘copywriting’ appearing on your site. For this reason, trusting third-party ‘guest-authors’, especially ones you pay, is fraught with danger.
Thinking IT copywriters can write and submit quality content articles containing links back to your website as part of your monthly SEO plan.
For clients that want to delve a little deeper, we’ve included Google’s ‘Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines‘ in .pdf format you can download and read at your leisure. It’s 172 pages long, so consider the environment before printing!
Please note: While we welcome questions on this as how it pertains to your website, we wont be providing a text or email ‘ping pong’ service, as the time it takes to write a detailed answer is significant and would substantially eat into your monthly SEO spend.
If you do have questions, feel free to call Nigel Brookson. Before 9am and after 6pm are ideal times for a ‘chat’.
It’s important to note that mis-information has been defined, as it has been historically with science, as information that does not follow the government narrative.
Regardless of how many PhD’s you have in the field or your world wide standing in the academic community, if you say or suggest anything that differs from the government’s message, the page and or website will be penalised, as will your content on social media sites until common sense and actual science trumps political spin, at which time you’ll get a ratings boost.
After A New Website Design That Ranks?
Whether you’re looking at upgrading or starting from scratch, provide services or have products you’d like to sell online, Thinking IT can design a stunning website for your business and make sure it ranks at the top of all search engine result pages (SERP).
After discussing your goals and analysing what you require, Nigel will be able to let you know exactly what the costs will be to meet your unique needs.
At Thinking IT, we can handle everything to make your online presence a success. From photography & graphic design services to copywriting your pages & website’s blog, set up automated email campaigns & look after your social media or PPC marketing.