New Google Rich Results Guidelines Prevent Prohibited, Regulated Or Harmful Products

Google Search has added new content guidelines to the rich results help document. These new guidelines directly disallow you to markup product or content that are widely prohibited or regulated, or that can facilitate serious harm to self or others. Google said it will simply not show rich results on such products.

Product examples include firearms & weapons, recreational drugs, tobacco, vaping products, gambling-related products and other products that can pose acute threats of physical harm.

The new guidelines were posted over here and read:

Don’t mark up content that promotes widely prohibited or regulated goods, services, or information that may facilitate serious and/or immediate or long term harm to self or others. This includes content related to firearms & weapons, recreational drugs, tobacco & vaping products and gambling-related products.

This new policy is effective already and I assume you will soon, if not already, not see rich results in Google Search for these types of products. This includes Google not showing star ratings, prices, or availability information and so on.

Google told me “this policy change will align the rich snippets feature with other Search surfaces that display product information from merchants, to help provide consistency and clarity.”

Google will not issue manual actions in Google Search Console for violation of this guidelines, Google will simply will just not show the rich results in Google Search.

Here is a screenshot from Glenn Gabe of it already going missing for sites:

And yep, review snippets are gone from the SERPs already for the verticals impacted. Will be interesting to track this over time. Here’s a quick example: pic.twitter.com/4h5nWcMdlb

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) June 30, 2022

Forum discussion at Twitter.