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Google has updated its search ranking algorithm to “more strongly affect the sites that host explicit videos but don’t allow Googlebot to fetch those video files” which may lead to a “significant drop in ranking” for some of these sites. Google also updated its SafeSearch documentation with new best practices and details.
Google wrote, “Google Search is updating the ranking algorithms to more strongly affect the sites that host explicit videos but don’t allow Googlebot to fetch those video files.” “These sites may experience a significant drop in ranking, especially in Video mode,” Google added.
Google linked to this new section that explains this part more. It reads:
If you have content behind an age gate or other access restriction, be sure to allow Googlebot to crawl your content without triggering the age gate. You can do this by verifying Googlebot requests and serving the content without age gate.
If you don’t allow Googlebot to crawl without triggering the age gate, it may cause your site to rank poorly on Google Search. Google might not be able to fetch your content, including image or video bytes, and therefore not be able to effectively rank that page for relevant queries. Additionally, if you host some non-explicit content behind age-gate and Googlebot cannot see it, there is a higher chance that this content or even the whole site gets classified automatically as explicit, which will make it ineligible to appear when the SafeSearch filter is on.
Meanwhile, the new documentation is over here and it goes through how Google handles explicit content in Search results, how SafeSearch works and how Google handles sites with a significant amount of removals of violative sexually explicit content.
SafeSearch is designed to filter results that lead to visual depictions of:
- Explicit sexual content of any type, including pornography
- Nudity
- Photo-realistic sex toys
- Sex-oriented dating or escort services
- Violence or gore
- Links to pages containing explicit content
Google also has these new sections for best practices for explicit content:
- Prevent user-generated harmful content on your platform.
- Allow Google to fetch your video content files.
- Allow Googlebot to crawl without age gate.
- Group explicit pages in a separate domain or subdomain.
- Mark specific pages as explicit with metadata.
Then Google posted a new document on troubleshooting issues wtih explicit content in Google Search. It includes:
- Determine if SafeSearch is filtering your website
- Resolve common mistakes such as:
- Adding the adult rating meta tag to content that’s not sexually explicit
- Labeling videos that aren’t explicit as not family_friendly in your video sitemap
- Allowing all UGC comments without content moderation
- Restricting Googlebot with an age gate
- Not separating explicit pages from non-explicit pages
So if you see a ranking drop, espesially for your videos, and you run an adult oriented site, you may want to review these new guidelines and best practices.
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