New: Google rich results are not allowed for banned, regulated or harmful products

Google Search has added new content guidelines to the rich results help document. These new guidelines expressly prohibit you from tagging products or content that are generally prohibited or regulated, or that may cause serious harm to yourself or others. Google said it simply won’t show rich results for such products.

Examples of products include firearms and weapons, recreational drugs, tobacco, vaping products, gambling-related products, and other products that may pose an acute threat of bodily harm.

New guidelines have been published here and read:

Do not post 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.

This new policy is already in effect and I predict that soon, if you haven’t already, you will no longer see enriched results on Google Search for these types of products. This includes Google not showing star ratings, pricing or availability information, etc.

Google told me “this policy change will bring the rich snippets feature into line with other search surfaces that display merchant product information to ensure consistency and clarity.”

Google will not issue manual actions in Google Search Console for violating these guidelines, Google will simply not display enriched results in Google Search.

Here is a screenshot from Glenn Gabe that is already missing from the sites:

And yes, review snippets have already disappeared from SERPs for affected verticals. It will be interesting to follow this over time. Here’s a quick example: pic.twitter.com/4h5nWcMdlb

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) June 30, 2022

Forum discussion at Twitter.