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Google has updated its rich results content guidelines to line up with the general merchant guidelines. The new rich results guidelines disallow widely prohibited and heavily regulated products or products that pose a threat to self or others.
These include, but are not limited to:
Weapons
Recreational Drugs
Tobacco & Vaping Products
Gambling Related Products
The new policy is effective immediately.
We don’t allow content that promotes widely prohibited or regulated goods, services, or information that may facilitate serious, immediate, or long-term harm to people. This includes content related to firearms and weapons, recreational drugs, tobacco and vaping products, and gambling-related products.
Google said the policy applies to all forms of rich result markup, such as star ratings, prices, and availability information.
This could include goods like fireworks, recreational drugs, and other products that can pose acute threats of physical harm,” – a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land.
Why Is This Important?
If you sell any of these types of products, it’s probably best to remove structured data markup from these pages. Otherwise, the rich results will not appear for these product categories.
Search Engine Land asked Google if they’re planning to send out any manual action within Google Search Console, and they said none will be issued. Instead, Google will only remove the rich results for these types of search results.
Google rich results guidelines now prohibits weapons, recreational drugs, tobacco & vaping products and gambling-related products https://t.co/njmfgtgH7y via @sengineland — Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) June 30, 2022
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