Recently, the Google Search Central SEO YouTube channel hosted another video call with John Mueller, where they discussed the types of structured data markup for sites with adult content.
The expert replied that regardless of the amount of 18+ content, websites are not allowed to show detailed results.
“I think in our rich results guidelines we say that none of [rich results types] are appropriate for adult websites,” Mueller said.
However, while Google does not create rich results for adult content, websites with adult content are not penalized or downgraded in search results.
“I don’t think there are any manual or anti-spam actions that could take place in something like this. Rather, our systems recognize it as: oh, this is an adult website and it wants to display these types of rich results, but since this is an adult website, we simply won’t show them. So it doesn’t look like he’s been downgraded or anything like that.”
Mueller went on to talk about whether adult websites are eligible for rich results if the content on some pages is safe for everyone. And it turned out that content security determines the SafeSearch filter. Any content that doesn’t pass the filters won’t have a rich search result. And if most of the site’s content, like the adult portal, has 18+ content, then SafeSearch can filter out the entire . However, you can make sure that only the part where the adult content is actually exchanged gets under the SafeSearch filter. Then the rest of the site with acceptable content can count on rich results.“If you have separate subdomains, some of which are mature and some of which are not, that makes things a bit easier. It will be much easier for us to understand that these are completely different websites that should be treated differently,” commented John Mueller.
It turns out that if all adult content is moved to a subdomain, the search engine will filter out only it and not affect safe pages.
