Google’s Rich Results Guidelines now ban weapons, recreational drugs, tobacco and vaping products, and gambling-related products

Google has updated its results-rich content guidelines to better align with our general merchant guidelines, disabling rich results for products that are generally banned or regulated or that could cause serious harm to yourself or others.

These include, but are not limited to, weapons, recreational drugs, tobacco and vaping products, and gambling-related products.

New guidelines for rich results. Google has updated guidelines for content with rich results to add this section:

Do not label content that promotes generally prohibited or regulated goods, services, or information that may cause serious and / or immediate or long-term harm to yourself or others. This includes content related to firearms and weapons, recreational drugs, tobacco and vaping products, and gambling-related products.

Application. Google said this policy applies to all forms of rich result tagging, including star ratings, pricing or availability information, and more. This can affect richly labeled structured data products that are generally banned or regulated or that can cause serious harm to yourself or others. “This could include goods such as fireworks, recreational drugs and other products that could pose an acute threat of personal injury,” said Google spokesman for Search Engine Land.

Effective immediately. Google has told us that this policy will take effect today, at the time of publication of this story.

Why we care. If you sell any of these types of products, you will probably want to remove the structured data tags from these pages. If you do not remove the tag, Google will not display rich results for these product categories.

We asked Google if you would receive any manual action within the Google Search Console and Google has said it will not issue manual actions, instead Google will simply remove rich results for these types of search results. Manual action will therefore not be carried out, but technically the removal of these rich results is punishment would be received for violating the guidelines on the content of rich results.

About the author

Barry Schwartz, co-editor of Search Engine Land and a member of the SMX events program team. He is the owner RustyBrick, an online consulting firm based in NY. It also flows Search engine roundtable, a popular search blog on highly advanced SEM topics. Barry can be traced on Twitter here.