E-E-A-T for Medical Content: Why Google Is Stricter With Health

Google's quality rater guidelines define a class of pages called Your Money or Your Life, meaning topics that could affect a person's health, financial stability, safety or wellbeing. Medical and dental content sits inside it by definition.

The consequence is not a separate algorithm. It is that the bar for what counts as adequate rises. A thin, unattributed page about a cosmetic procedure may rank acceptably. A thin, unattributed page about a surgical one is judged against a much higher expectation of who wrote it and what backs it.

E-E-A-T is the vocabulary Google uses for this: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. The first E, experience, was added later and it is the one clinics are best placed to demonstrate and least likely to bother with.

It is worth being precise about what E-E-A-T is not. It is not a score in the algorithm that you can raise directly. It is a description of what the systems try to approximate. So the work is not to satisfy a metric, it is to publish the things a careful reader would want to see.

The single most common failure on Mexican clinic sites is content with no author at all. An article about periodontal disease published by nobody, reviewed by nobody, updated on no date.

The fix costs nothing. Sign the article with the treating professional's name, their specialty, the institution that issued their degree and their professional licence number. Link it to a real biography page.

Here is where two obligations converge conveniently. Article 19 of Mexico's health advertising regulation already requires that advertising by health professionals state the educational institution that issued their title, diploma or certificate and, where applicable, their licence number. The credential you have to publish for regulatory reasons is the same credential that establishes expertise for a reader and a search engine. Most clinics do neither, when doing one does both.

If content is written by a marketing team rather than a clinician, say so and add a named clinical reviewer with a review date. That is honest, it is standard practice on serious health sites, and it is far better than an unsigned page pretending to authority it does not have.

Give each professional a real biography page: training, years in practice, hospital affiliations, professional associations, the procedures they actually perform. This is the entity Google is trying to evaluate. A name in a byline that leads nowhere gives it nothing to work with.

Health content that cites nothing is asking to be trusted on assertion. Health content that cites another clinic's blog post is worse, because it inherits that page's errors.

Cite the primary source: the norma oficial mexicana, the Secretaría de Salud guidance, the clinical practice guideline, the peer-reviewed study, the manufacturer's instructions for use. Link to it. Name it in the text rather than hiding it behind a vague "studies show."

Date-stamp claims that move. Prevalence figures, treatment protocols and regulatory requirements all change, and a page confidently stating a 2019 protocol in 2026 signals neglect more loudly than no page at all.

A concrete example of why this matters: a great deal of Mexican clinic content about patient data still cites the INAI as the supervising authority. Under the data protection law published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on 20 March 2025 and in force the following day, the INAI was dissolved and its functions in this area transferred to the Secretaría de Anticorrupción y Buen Gobierno. Any page still naming the INAI is visibly out of date, and it is out of date on precisely the kind of factual point a careful reader can check in thirty seconds.

Distinguish what is established from what is contested. Writing "the evidence is mixed" where the evidence is mixed builds more trust than flattening it into certainty, and it is the difference between a page written by someone who knows the field and one written from three competitor blogs.

Expertise is credentials. Experience is having done the thing. A practising clinician has an enormous amount of the second and almost never puts it on the page.

Case descriptions, written within confidentiality limits, are the strongest form. NOM-004-SSA3-2012 establishes that for purposes of medical literature, teaching, research or photographs that allow identifying the patient, publishing or disclosing personal data from the clinical file requires the patient's written authorisation, and obliges adopting the measures needed so the patient cannot be identified. This is a regulatory summary, not legal advice: confirm the requirements applicable to your case with a specialised lawyer. Within those limits, describing what a case presented with, what was considered, what was done and how it resolved demonstrates experience no amount of general prose can imitate.

Volume statements help when they are true and specific. The number of a given procedure performed, the years the practice has operated, the equipment actually in the building.

Photographs of your own clinic, staff and equipment do more than stock imagery does. A page about implant surgery illustrated with a stock photo of a smiling model is a page that has told the reader nothing about you.

Answer the questions patients actually ask in consultation, in the words they use. The recovery, the pain, the cost, whether they can drive home, what happens if it fails. Clinical writing tends toward the procedure; patients arrive worrying about the aftermath.

Google describes trust as the most important member of the family, and much of it is unglamorous site work rather than writing.

A findable physical address, a phone number that a human answers, and consistent details between the site and the Google Business ProfileGoogle Business ProfileYour free listing on Google and Google Maps with your address, hours, photos and reviews. It is the first thing many people see when they search for your business.Read more →. Inconsistency here is both a ranking problem and a credibility problem.

A privacy notice that reflects the law actually in force, not a template from a decade ago. For a clinic this is not decorative: health data is sensitive personal data, and the notice is where you tell patients what you collect and why.

Clear separation between information and promotion. A page that explains a condition and then pivots into a hard sell reads as an advertisement wearing an article's clothes, and both readers and raters are good at spotting it.

No claims you cannot support. This is the point where E-E-A-T and Mexican regulation say the same thing, since article 18 of the health advertising regulation withholds authorisation from advertising offering treatments whose efficacy has not been scientifically proven.

Working links, current pages, no orphaned service pages for procedures you stopped offering two years ago. We cover the structural side of this in sitio web para clínicas.

Rewriting everything is the plan that never happens. Order the work instead.

First, sign what already exists. Adding author, credential and review date to your current articles is a day of work and it addresses the most common gap.

Second, build the biography pages. One per professional, real detail, linked from every article they sign.

Third, audit the pages that make claims. Anything promising a result, a recovery time or a success rate needs a source or a rewrite, and this is where regulatory and quality risk overlap.

Fourth, fix the privacy notice and the contact consistency.

Only then write new content. New articles on a site with no authorship infrastructure inherit the same weakness the old ones had.