Our analysis of Google’s latest “core algorithm update” (also known as the Medic update) indicated that Expertise, Authority & Trust (EAT) are more important than ever, especially when it comes to content creation. In other words, content created by real experts, from websites that people can trust and which have authority in their specific niche is seeing the most benefits.
The data shows that this update mainly impacted websites in the financial and health sectors. These are industry niches in which Google takes the quality of each site very seriously, since poor information could have a significant impact on a searcher’s life. Hence the search engine calls these sites "Your Money or Your Life" websites in its Quality Rater Guidelines (guidelines used by thousands of people that Google employs to rate the quality of sites that appear in search results).
This update may be no surprise to companies in those industries (except for the losers), since Google specifically calls out health content for overall page quality rating for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It suggests medical advice should be written by people with medical expertise or accreditation for example.
In a nutshell then, Google has improved the quality and/or relevance of the search results for queries so that pages that better meet the search intent for a keyword have improved their rankings and performance in searches. Google’s Danny Sullivan in a tweet provided advice which is similar to what the search engine has been saying for a long time: To make up any losses in rankings, websites should build great content.