Understanding pages and sites: purpose, YMYL and the parts of a page

What the document says

Part 1 opens by defining the Page Quality (PQ) task: given a URL, evaluate how well the page achieves its purpose. Everything that follows — the Lowest-to-Highest scale, E-E-A-T, reputation — derives from that question. To answer it, the rater needs three fundamentals.

The purpose of the page

Every page was created for a reason. Most exist to help people (a beneficial purpose); some exist purely to make money while delivering nothing; others exist to cause harm. The first step of any evaluation is identifying the purpose — because the purpose sets the criteria. A currency converter is judged by whether the calculator works; a humor page, by whether it’s funny. The document is emphatic: the type of page does not determine the score. There are excellent and terrible pages of every type — stores, news, forums, video, gossip, humor.

YMYL — Your Money or Your Life

Some topics carry real risk: they could significantly impact people’s health, financial stability or safety, or the welfare of society. These are YMYL topics, split into health/safety, financial security, government/society and other harms. The test is a spectrum, not a binary, and the document offers two tiebreaker questions: would a careful person seek out experts on this to prevent harm? Or is it the kind of subject people happily settle by asking friends? Tsunami evacuation routes are clearly YMYL; the weather forecast probably isn’t; music award winners definitely aren’t. For clearly YMYL topics, the rating standards are the highest in the document.

The parts of the page: MC, SC and Ads

All content on a page falls into one of three buckets. Main Content (MC) is whatever directly helps the page achieve its purpose — text, images, videos, functionality, user reviews, and even the page title. Supplementary Content (SC) contributes to the experience without being the reason the page exists — navigation, related links. Ads is everything that monetizes — and the document goes out of its way to say that the presence of ads, by itself, is grounds for neither a high nor a low score: without monetization, much good content wouldn’t exist. But the site is responsible for the quality of the ads it displays, even when it doesn’t control each creative.

Closing the section, the document teaches the rater to act like a detective: find the homepage, figure out who is responsible for the site and who created the content on the page, and locate contact information — with requirements proportional to the type of site. A store that handles money needs visible payment, exchange and return policies; a humor site doesn’t. Anonymity has legitimate room (forums, personal sites), but the general rule is clear: quality sites are eager to say who they are.

In practice

“Why does this page exist?” is the cheapest audit question there is. Before looking at keywords, backlinks or Core Web Vitals, answer it for every template on your site. If the honest answer is “to capture traffic for a keyword,” you’re describing a page the document says to rate Lowest — created to benefit the owner, not the visitor.

Place your site on the YMYL spectrum before setting your editorial bar. Fintech, health, law, civic news: you’re in the maximum-scrutiny regime — you need identified, qualified authors, factual precision and consistency with expert consensus. A cooking or entertainment blog answers to a different bar. People routinely apply the YMYL recipe to light niches (pointless bureaucracy) or the light recipe to YMYL niches (existential risk).

The title is MC. A clickbait headline that doesn’t summarize the content is a defect in the main content, not a CTR trick. And user reviews can be MC — on a product page, the content your customers generate is part of what Google evaluates as yours.

Who signs what should be answerable in two clicks. Who’s responsible for the site, who created the content, how to reach you. If a trained evaluator can’t find it, neither can the user — and Google’s systems are trained to reward sites where it’s obvious. The “about us” page isn’t decorative corporate filler; it’s trust infrastructure.