Google’s John Mueller said in the Friday webmaster hangout said that “especially for medical topics, anything that’s a little bit more critical” Google is more selective and critical over. He said he would see an “medical e-commerce site kind of falling into that category.”

In short, Google will apply a higher level of scrutiny on sites with medical information, including e-commerce sites that sell medical equipment, when deciding where to rank that site. You need more signals of E-A-T (whatever that might mean) when trying to rank for medical queries – be it informational or transactional.

John said this at the 20:47 mark into the video, he said:

I like how Glenn Gabe summed it up on Twitter:

I remember when I kind of labeled one of these updates the medic update and I got a lot of heat around it but as we continue to learn more, I think I was pretty close on that…

Anyway, here is the video embed at the start time:

Forum discussion at Twitter.