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Does an EAT score on my YMYL site impact my rankings?
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I've read some conflicting information on YMYL and EAT. If the Google Quality Raters are out there reviewing YMYL pages and scoring them on EAT, does that site's score have an impact on that page's/site's ranking?
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The purpose of Search Quality Evaluators (SQE) is to ensure that the desired results of algorithm updates are being met. They do not have a direct impact on your site. A low rating by a SQE will not directly affect your site.
What you may notice is that if your site is not meeting the guidelines and other sites from that search aren't either, your site may be affected by future algorithm updates to filter those types of results out. But it won't be on a per site basis and will generally affect a particular type of search and not others. Meaning that if you scored low on one type of result but high on another, the high one wouldn't necessarily be affected by the lower rating. Again, that's because it's not on a site basis, but a search basis.
I should mention for people reading this who aren't familiar with YMYL or EAT, that those stand for "Your Money or Your Life" and "Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness" respectively.
These are guidelines use by a SQEs to ensure certain types of sites meet higher standards.
YMYL is covered in the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines in Part 1: Section 2.3
EAT is covered in the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines in Part 1: Section 3.2
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