Google removes gambling-related products and services from rich results

[The Buzz]

Google has updated its rich results content guidelines to "align better with the overall Google merchant guidelines," disallowing rich results for gambling-related products, as well as weapons, recreational drugs, tobacco and vaping products.

From the new content guidelines:

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.

From Search Engine Land:

Google said this policy applies to all forms of rich result markup, including star ratings, prices, or availability information and more. This can impact products with rich result structured data markup that are widely prohibited or regulated, or that can facilitate serious harm to self or others. “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.

Effective immediately. Google told us this policy goes into affect today, at the time this story has published.

Why we care. If you sell any of these types of products, you will probably want to remove the structured data markup from those pages. If you do not remove the markup, either way, Google will not show rich results for these product categories.

We did ask Google if you will receive some sort of manual action within Google Search Console and Google said it will not issue manual actions, instead Google will simply just remove the rich results for these types of search results. So no manual action will be given but technically the removal of these rich results is the penalty one would receive for violating the rich results content guidelines.

Read more here: https://searchengineland.com/google-...roducts-386185

[connd]

I trustd they'll be taking their own advice onboard.

https://imgur.com/a/yMVOLZS

[AussieDave]

I trustd they'll be taking their own advice onboard.

Pffff don't be silly, Google is the world leader in double standards and hypocrisies

[MJM]

I trustd they'll be taking their own advice onboard.

https://imgur.com/a/yMVOLZS

I sure hope this will also be phased out - I can confirm all star ratings are gone for most "review" type serps, but seeing it ONLY remain on google's own properties is BS at the moment.

[econfox]

What I always worried about.

As gambling / sports betting is legalized across the US it means that legal ads can be sold. Why allow some small business that spent a lot of time writing copy that met all of Google requirements to be featured above the fold when you can remove it and replace it with ads from corporate casinos.

Why allow organic content when casinos are willing to spend $15+ a click on casino keywords?