Unveiling Google’s Impact on Alternative Health Websites
Brace yourself, alternative health warriors and wellness seekers—Google’s shadowy algorithm updates, wielding the iron fist of E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) and YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) standards, are crushing your access to holistic healing insights! I watched in horror as my own alternative health website plummeted from page 1 to page 17 in 2020, despite exhaustive SEO overhauls with SemRush and Ahrefs, exposing a sinister purge silencing natural remedies and supplement sites like mine. This exposé rips back the curtain on Google’s secretive quality raters and Medic update, revealing a conspiracy that buries trusted voices—Dr. Joe Mercola’s 99% traffic drop screams foul—while big retailers like Amazon skate free, leaving us to ask: who gave Google the power to dictate your health truth?
Enter: The New Search Engine Reality
Do you run an alternative health and wellness practice or sell natural remedies online? Are you someone who searches the internet for quick health tips when you’re feeling down, an available product, or holistic technique to aid your recovery?
Have you noticed a steep decline in insightful health articles lately, with their place being filled with technical clinical trials that can barely be deciphered? What happened to all of the user-friendly pages you found before? Are you curious why they seemed to have disappeared? The changes you may have observed in recent search results revolve around how search engines process information.
I am not one to share intimate details about my life, but In 2020 I noticed a significant reduction of traffic going to my alternative health website. A quick Google search showed my webpage had dropped from its traditional placement on the first few pages of a search result down to page 17. To say I was freaking out is an understatement.
For the next year, I invested a vast amount of time and energy cleaning up my webpage based on the standards established by Google. I took an in-depth course on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I paid for the services of companies whose mission is to identify errors on a site. My efforts included a complete redesign, the consolidation and rewriting of articles, the optimization of images, and the reduction of my page’s loading speed. These changes, according to SEO experts, should cause my site to soar up Google’s ranks.
According to one online SE0 service provider, SemRush, the quality changes I made improved my ‘site’s health’ from a health score of 70% to a score of 93%. Ahrefs, another SEO provider, scored my site at 95%. Then, I waited for the Google magic to happen. But it didn’t, at least not in the dramatic way I had hoped. My page moved from page 17 to 11, but I couldn’t figure out why I was unable to rank any higher.
My deep dive into this problem unearthed a cascade of Google trade secrets. So, while this article series focuses on website search engine placement for alternative health websites, it is also geared to help the end user, the health-minded individual, understand the drastic changes they have seen when looking for wellness information. It is my hope this article will expose what is going on behind the scenes at Google.
Part II: The Google Playbook: Why Your Site Can’t Crack the Top Spot
If you are a website owner you might wonder what you need to do to achieve the coveted spot of ranking #1 in Google’s Search Engine. Why be concerned about Google when there are other search engine options available? Because Google processes 92% of all search queries globally.
According to statistics compiled thus far in 2025, Google processes about 63,000 searches per second, 8.5 billion searches daily totaling up to a whopping 1.2 trillion search queries per year. Coming in second is Bing who occupies about 3.7% of the market share. Bing is followed by Yahoo at 1.2% and DuckDuckGo at 0.6% respectively. With Google dominating the overwhelming majority of the search engine market, it is critical to play by Google’s rules if you want your site to be found and your company to thrive.
Basic search engine visibility according to Google is controlled by a set of step-by-step instructions (an algorithm) that ranks a page based on several key factors. These on-page optimization features include the utilization of keywords, headings, descriptions, and structured data for rich snippits. There are guidelines specifying the ideal length of a title and meta description, a site’s page speed, and the required amount of incoming and outbound links. These are just a few of the items Google looks for.
Your site should sail up the list and get you onto page 1 theoretically speaking, if you follow their guidance. To that end, countless services can help you to clean up your site and optimize your content. These include online search engine optimization (SEO) services such as Semrush, AhRef, Moz, Sitechecker, and more. There are also WordPress plugins, like Yoast, that will help you in this endeavor. A quick online search will also reveal countless articles with insights and suggested tools you can use to improve your page rank.
Sounds easy enough. That’s what I thought when I discovered my site had crashed and burned. So I set upon the endeavor of cleaning up my site, ensuring that each errant item detected was corrected. Did it improve my placement within Google’s search? Not as much as I had hoped for.
Through countless hours of digging into the problem, I discovered there is a vast amount of information Google doesn’t make evident in its often vague guidance. This makes it challenging figuring out why your site isn’t doing well, or why it has dropped off the face of the planet, leaving you out in the cold.
You might try in vain to improve your site titles, add descriptions to your images, organize and reorganize your data, update your pages and posts, and work on getting high-quality backlinks, all to no avail. No matter what you try, you are still not seeing any significant improvements.
Befuddled, you might still be scratching your head trying to figure out what has happened. I would like to make this suggestion. Perhaps your site lost its placement because you, your business, and your webpage got hit and devaluated by one of Google’s many algorithms.
Part III: Google’s Secret Algorithm: Why Your Site Might Be Vanishing
Google regularly updates their algorithm, which filters and rates websites based on predetermined key characteristics. Some updates are small while others are larger and more widespread, vastly impacting how Google Search functions According to geeksforgeeks.org, “Algorithms form the basis of computer programming and are used to solve problems ranging from simple sorting and searching to complex tasks such as artificial intelligence and machine learning… Algorithms are used to analyze, process, and extract insights from large amounts of data in fields such as marketing, finance, and healthcare.”
These algorithm updates are often rolled out in the middle of the night and are only confirmed by Google after the fact. Specific information about what was added or deleted from the update is rarely exposed.
SEO specialists, individuals who manage web page performance, often discover cryptic comments made by Google insiders after an update has been released. They are left guessing what changes were made and speculate how the update will affect their client’s website.
Only after intense data analysis over multiple websites and some deep diving, can they come to some understanding of what just happened. If this sounds clandestine, tricky, and lacking transparency, it is!
The first of this kind of widespread change appeared in 2013 with the incorporation of a new website classification: ‘Your Money or Your Life’ (YMYL). The YMYL provision looks to ensure ‘high quality’ search results come from individuals or organizations with the appropriate expertise and authority. They were looking for reputable contributors.
Their reasoning for this new classification was to ferret out sites that provide harmful, misleading or inaccurate information. These sites might seriously impact an individual’s health, safety, and happiness.
E-A-T, or ‘Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness’, was introduced in 2014. This concept describes additional criteria websites must meet in order to rank well in Google’s search engine results. Google suggests E-A-T is important because it helps them identify websites that are trustworthy sources of information. A page with a good E-A-T rating is featured higher in search results than those that are considered less worthy.
2018 saw the roll-out of the first in a series of alterations to Google’s algorithm that made the YMYL classification and E-A-T principles an integral part of how the search engine looked at a site. Dubbed “Medic” due to the vast number of health and wellness sites it involved, it changed the landscape of Google online searching, thus upending countless individuals.
The Medic update did not just affect health-related websites. Other industries impacted revolved around finance and banking, legal advice, E-commerce, and insurance to name a few of the all-encompassing subjects. Search Engine Roundtable did an analysis of 325 organizations who reported experiencing a crash in their search placement after the Medic update. Sites that could be identified as YMYL made up the majority of those impinged upon, with health and wellness sites composing a good 40% of the sites affected.
Navigating Google’s Standards: Is Your Site Trustworthy Enough to Survive?
One key feature Google uses to evaluate a site is the site’s Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) What is E-A-T? Google suggests receiving a positive E-A-T rating the content creator has to demonstrate:
- Expertise: in the topics they are covering. This can be achieved through firsthand or professional experience/credentials, educational degrees, professional citations, employment history or history of producing content.
- Authoritativeness: of a sites participating contributors. They have to demonstrate the knowledge, skills or expertise to discuss the topic. They should be recognized as leaders in their industry.
- Trustworthiness: The website must reliable, instill confidence, be safe, honest and accurate in its content and/or business practices.
Tucked neatly into the E-A-T page assessment requirement is the evaluation of any YMYL pages (3.4.1 YMYL Topics: Experience or Expertise?). A page falls under the YMYL classification if it asks for personal information such as a driver’s license number or pages used for financial transactions, such as doing an online purchase.
Websites that present medical or health information, ones that offer financial or legal advice, or input on major decisions, like purchasing a home or new car also fall into this category. Even sites that report the news can be subject to this stringent Google assessment and be identified as a YMYL page.
Google holds anything it has identified as potentially impacting your health, finances or safety (YMYL) to a higher standard. These pages are evaluated with a deeper level of scrutiny than other pages, to eliminate harmfully misleading, inaccurate, or untrustworthy information. Examples they provide include sites that offer:
- Clearly inaccurate harmful information that can easily be refuted by straightforward and widely accepted facts.
- Harmful unsubstantiated theories/claims not grounded in any reasonable facts or evidence.
Specific examples of offending topics contain claims that:
- Lemons cure cancer.
- The 9-11 attacks were planned by the US government.
- World leaders are lizard people.
Any topic, according to Google, that contradicts the established scientific consensus is demonstrably inaccurate or is not grounded by reasonable evidence. These pages receive low ratings.
There is one exception to the YMYL rule. Pages that offer firsthand accounts on a given subject may be considered as having a high E-A-T value. That is as long as the topic is consistent with the established consensus. There’s no telling how well a site that details an individual’s personal encounters with extraterrestrial life will be judged. If it is going against the established scientific consensus, I can only assume not well.
Sites that are devoted to cooking, fashion and beauty, home decorating, sports, and entertainment, or ones sharing family photos or pictures of your pet, tend to be exempt.
Part IV: Google’s Shadow Judges: Are Quality Raters Shaping Your Search Fate?
But wait, there’s more. Hidden behind the various Google updates is a little talked about practice that occurs behind the scenes at Google. It is the utilization of ‘Search Quality Raters’.
The Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines: An Overview rationalizes the employment of human Quality Raters. It informs us “However, when it comes to reliability — that is, finding high- quality, trustworthy information — even with our advanced information understanding capabilities, search engines like Google do not understand content the way humans do. Our systems often can’t tell from the words or images alone if something is exaggerated, incorrect, low quality, or otherwise unhelpful.”
To fully grasp the significance of the Quality Raters Guidelines, it‘s essential to understand the role of the quality raters themselves. These individuals, hired by Google through a 3rd party, are tasked with evaluating the value and relevance of search results.
The Overview goes on to tell us Google employs about 16,000 individuals who work as Search Quality Raters. Their function is to provide an unbiased evaluation of a site; not based upon an individual’s preferences, personal opinion, religious beliefs, or political views. They then, using their best judgment, supply ratings to websites based on the guidance Google provides.
Quality raters, as also stated in their Overview, come from diverse backgrounds and are located around the world to ensure that search results are assessed through a global lens. They undergo extensive training in order to apply the guidelines consistently and objectively across various types of content and search queries.
Google notes that quality raters do not directly influence the rankings of individual pages. Instead, their feedback is used to validate and improve Google‘s search algorithm.
Quality Raters are instructed to apply very high Page Quality (PQ) standards to pages with YMYL content. Thus, if a page has a poor E-A-T score and is also identified as being YMYL, it can be flagged as being harmful, misleading, or deceptive. These pages end up with a low page quality score. They are not taken down but are dropped back in the search rankings.
It is assumed the first Google‘s Quality Raters Guidelines, and I am conjecturing the employment of Quality Raters, occurred in 2011. Lily Ray’s comments in her November 2022 article 7 Takeaways from the SMX Next Keynote with Hyung-Jin Kim, VP Search at Google, “Kim also noted that Google has been using E-A-T for approximately 10-13 years, which dates it back to 2009-2013. In the SEO community, we weren’t publicly made aware of this concept until the 2014 version of the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, and the role of E-A-T didn’t start to take the forefront of the SEO discussion until about 2018.”
This suggests this evaluation strategy could have been employed as early as 2009, years before anyone in the SEO world knew it existed. Over the years, Google‘s Quality Raters Guidelines have been amended to keep pace with our ever-changing world and advances in search engine technology.
Here’s the rub…
Google does not willingly release its Search Quality Raters Guidelines. Contents of the document that controls perhaps the most far-reaching online system, the guideline which dictates what sites will live and which ones will die have only been discovered through data leaks from Google.
Their Quality Raters Guidelines have never been released to the public. They do publish a watered-down version of their guide, yet it is vastly different from the one used internally.
So why all of the mystery? Why do researchers, content creators, business owners, and people who do webpage optimization, have to break out their crystal ball trying to figure out what is happening behind Google’s closed doors? I feel a conspiracy coming on.
Part V: Google’s Health Purge: Silencing Alternative Voices in the Name of Trust”
It appears as if Google is invested in protecting you from medical heretics, those that go outside of the mainstream medical model. They are saving you from yourself by limiting your exposure to any dangerous and potentially harmful alternative health practices.
When surveyed, multiple mainstream healthcare websites suggest there is an overabundance of people out there who claim to be experts. They contend they do not have the licenses, training, or credentials to support their professional claims. The same holds true for companies that manufacture dietary supplements, whether it is a vitamin, mineral, or herbal preparation.
These individuals and companies according to Google are a threat to society. Their message is silenced by the criteria established in Google’s E-A-T and YMYL policies.
In the 2019 article, Google Radically Restricts the Flow of Information on Alternative Healthcare by Erik Goldman, writing for Nutraceuticals World we learn, “In roughly the same time period, Dr. Joe Mercola saw a 99% drop in traffic to his popular site, www.mercola.com. Dr. Andrew Weil’s www.drweil.com experienced a 66% decline. GreenMedInfo saw an 81% reduction in the site’s search visibility. MindBodyGreen reported a 55% drop. Lynn McTaggart, producer of the online magazine, What Doctors Don’t Tell You, said her traffic tanked by half.
Joe Cohen, CEO of SelfHacked.com saw a 94% drop. Kelly Brogan, MD, an outspoken functional medicine psychiatrist, reported that her site, which averaged over 225,000 impressions per month, flatlined in early June.
Supplement companies, educational organizations in holistic/functional medicine, and individual practitioners have also taken major hits to their online traffic over the last 6 months.”
With alternative voices fading under Google’s purge, we’re left to ask: who gave a search engine the power to decide which experts deserve a platform and which truths are too risky to hear?
Part VI: Who Judges the Judges? Google’s War on Alternative Expertise
It is not my point to argue the fact that there is indeed information online that might be misleading, inaccurate, or pose a potential threat to the end user. Identifying what is good and safe from what is not, is a judgment call, seen through the eyes of the viewer. This leads me to this question. Who is making the decisions regarding what is accurate versus inaccurate, misleading, fact, fiction, or fake?
Google is unambiguous in its search criteria. They insinuate they only want high-quality professionals represented at the top of their search results but who at Google has the credentials to make these kinds of decisions? They have become the arbiters of our fate, deciding what is true or false. What we believe, think and feel is irrelevant if it steps outside of the established scientific consensus.
Taken one step further, what about the reviewers themselves? What qualifications do they have to give a thumb up or thumb down to a website?
Individuals such as doctors Mercola, Weil and Brogan are well-respected traditionally trained physicians. Yet their sites, it would seem, did not pass their E-A-T and YMYL assessments and received a low page value. Their sites sank to the bottom of search results with traffic going to their sites coming to a virtual halt. Aren’t their personal and professional experience, credibility, and trust factors good enough?
Some suggest when they stepped out of the established mainstream medical consensus touting their unorthodox views they were attacked and treated like pariahs. Their work was deemed ‘untrustworthy, deceptive, harmful to people or society, or have other highly undesirable characteristics.’
If medical doctors with stellar backgrounds such as theirs can be demonized for their stance on health and health care, it is surely a death sentence for the many smaller alternative healthcare providers like me. Many in the alternative health field have spent a career cultivating their craft, learning the tools of trade with one goal in mind – helping people feel better.
This is not the first time this has happened, but hopefully it is the last.
Part VII: History Repeats: How Alternative Therapies Face the Same Old Suppression
This is not the first time a crackdown on alternative therapies has been enacted. A report commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation in the early 20th century had a similar impact on non-traditional therapies. As expressed in the article History – Dinshah P. Ghadiali, posted on the Bioregulatory Medicine Institute website, “Homeopathic and naturopathic colleges, clinics, hospitals, and programs were closed and numerous non-pharmaceutical therapies, such as color therapy, magneto-therapy, electrical therapies, chiropractic and midwifery were singled-out by the FDA to be eliminated.”
The eradication of his wellness practice was the fate of one of the early health pioneers who steered away from mainstream medicine. Child prodigy and genius, Dinshah P. Ghadiali was a leader in the field of color therapy (chromotherapy).
Dinshah contended that an illness or injury could be remediated when the body was exposed to specific light frequencies. He believed color and light enacted positive physiologic changes in the body. His detractors, including the American Cancer Society claimed, “available scientific evidence does not support claims that alternative uses of light or color therapy are effective in treating cancer or other illnesses”.
For his work, and as some suggest his patient’s successful recovery, the US Government and the American Medical Association (AMA) did everything in their power to shut him down. He endured a series of court actions and was arrested for fraud and making false claims about his device. To escape jail time, Dinshah was required to stop practicing chromotherapy. His unsold devices were destroyed and ones that had been sold to practitioners were confiscated.
You would think after all Dinshah suffered the crazy idea that light rays could offer a therapeutic advantage would have withered on the vine. If you did, you would be mistaken. Today, sites like WebMD and the Cleveland Clinic tout the benefits of red light therapy (chromotherapy) for pain reduction, arthritis, dementia, acne, wrinkles, hair loss and more.
Hypocrisy in Healing: When Science Catches Up to the Silenced
The double standard doesn’t end there. Section 4.4 Harmfully Misleading Information in Google’s own Quality Raters Guide specifically states “Pages should be considered to contain Harmfully Misleading Information when they contain at least one of the following.” Of the specific examples offered is the assertion that “lemons cure cancer”.
Any website which contends lemons can cure cancer should be identified as having violated section 4.4 of their directive and be flagged as being a low-quality site. Would it surprise you to find out lemons may have some therapeutic advantage in cancer reduction? Where did this information come from? It came from several highly respected sites. Headlines include:
- Daily Consumption of Lemon and Ginger Herbal Infusion Caused Tumor Regression and Activation of the Immune System in a Mouse Model of Breast Cancer
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9043650/ - Health Benefits of Lemon
WebMD (https://www.webmd.com/diet/health-benefits-lemon) - Anticancer Potential of Citrus Juices and Their Extracts: A Systematic Review of Both Preclinical and Clinical Studies
PubMed Central/National Library Of Medicine (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5491624/) - 9 Health Benefits of Lemons: Reduce Your Risk of Cancer, Anemia, and More
University Health News (https://universityhealthnews.com/daily/nutrition/lemon-health-benefits-reduce-risk-cancer-anemia/) - 6 Evidence-Based Health Benefits of Lemons
HealthLine (https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/6-lemon-health-benefits#reduce-risk-of-cancer) - If this is the case, where did Google get their advice regarding the health benefits lemons? Clearly not from these well esteemed, industry leaders.
Selective Scrutiny: Big Retailers vs. Small Health Sites in the Supplement Crackdown
The crackdown on alternative health sites also saw a scourging of companies that produce vitamins, minerals, and nutritional supplements. Making claims a supplement can alleviate a health concern was viewed by Google as providing harmful information. This garnered the site a poor YMYL and E-A-T rating and lowered search position placement.
It only takes a quick exploration on Amazon.com to reveal the availability of supplements that claim to fix all kinds of health concerns. Type ‘lower blood pressure’ into Amazon’s search feature and screen after screen of products appear. The same occurs when you look for products to lower blood sugar levels, break up kidney or gallstones, and even fight cancer.
Are these listings making false or misleading claims about their products? And if so, why hasn’t Amazon been tossed to the bottom of the search engine pile since they are breaking one of Google’s stated edicts? How do they survive unscathed? I, and I’m sure the many others who have been affected by Google’s algorithm would like to know.
So, hey Google, why them and not me? Why do they get the big pass and are allowed to keep their high ranking while the rest of us are tossed under the preverbal bus?
Part VIII: The Unseen Verdict: Can Your Site Ever Escape the Algorithm Abyss?
The saddest part in this cadre of confusion was best said by Barry Schwartz in his August 2018 article Google’s Aug. 1 Core Algorithm Update: Who Did It Impact, And How Much? If you have found yourself caught up and devalued in one of Google’s key updates know this … “Google is telling us that there is nothing you can do to fix your site, so you should just focus on making a great experience, offer better content and a more useful website.”
Whether what Barry Scwartz said in 2018 is the reality and you cannot recover your site, it does seem clear that if you are a business that deals in YMYL activities and produces YMYL content, the fix seems bigger than the problem.
Google doesn’t offer any solutions. They just leave you in the wind wondering what you can do to save your business.
Some SEO experts recommend eliminating or rewriting your content to move your site out of the YMYL category. Others suggest creating a separate site for your YMYL content. It could take months if not years for a small business owner like me to rewrite, reorganize, or somehow fix my existing content.
My site is inherently YMYL. It has been cultivated over many years of research and writing. Even if I made the suggested changes, would I be forced to step away from my core mission – helping people with their health concerns, all to satisfy Google? Yes, I would love to recover my business and achieve higher search rankings but at what cost?
Here is the kicker. Even if you did update your site so it is more E-A-T friendly the work you do does guarantee success.
The domination Google has over online searches is silencing an entire group of alternative perspectives. The only voice being heard is the mainstream narrative. Their tactic of devaluing a website because someone somewhere does not agree with its message is taking away the right to be heard of those who dare to step outside of the established scientific consensus. The net result: they and their business are left to scrape by or vanish into oblivion.
Who put Google in charge of deciding what is true?
With a growing population of people wanting to live a more natural, healthy lifestyle, it seems like it is time for Google to release its stranglehold on alternative health and wellness sites. One thing for certain, it is killing businesses, practices, and maybe even you.
About The Author
Dr. Rita Louise is the founder of the Institute of Applied Energetics and the former host of Just Energy Radio. She is a Naturopathic Physician and a 30-year veteran in the Human Potential Field. She is the author of the seven books as well as hundreds of articles that have been published worldwide. She is the producer of a number of full length and feature videos. Dr. Rita has appeared on film, radio, television and has spoken at conferences around the world. Dr. Rita created her first webpage in 1996. Over the years she has created and actively maintained multiple sites covering a variety of topics. For more information about Dr. Rita and her work, please visit her site https://soulhealer.com
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