Removing unqualified medical claims: a YMYL liability-and-ranking study

Removing unqualified medical claims: a YMYL liability-and-ranking study

The question: on YMYL, does *removing* overreaching content — claims a site is not qualified to make — improve standing, even though it means publishing less?

A documented wellness case: a supplement-adjacent site had pages making specific disease-treatment claims without clinical support. Facing both EEAT decline and regulatory exposure, it removed or heavily qualified ~80 such claims across ~120 pages, added 'consult a professional' framing, and cited what evidence actually existed. Reported result over ~6 months: average position improved ~1.9 positions and brand-query sentiment improved, despite the pages now claiming less.

This fits the QRG's harshest YMYL instruction (section 4.0): content that could cause harm by being inaccurate on medical topics warrants Lowest, regardless of polish. Removing harmful overreach removes the very thing that caps the rating.

Counter-evidence: the rewrite also improved accuracy and added citations, so the gain may be from the better content that replaced the claims, not from the removal itself.

Caveat: this is one of the few cases where doing *less* helped — but only because what was removed was actively harmful. It does not generalize to removing benign content.

What we still don't know: whether Google's systems detect specific unsupported medical claims, or whether the improvement traces entirely to the higher-quality replacement content and reduced negative reputation.