Will profanities hurt your search rankings?
TL;DR:
We don’t have a direct answer for this one from Google, but evidence suggests that you shouldn’t use bad words for several reasons.
The anecdotes:
- According to my personal experience, Google won’t show any snippets that contain cursing.
- Google might censor or replace profanities in your titles and meta descriptions. How this affects the ranking is uncertain.
- If your content is R-rated and the user will have SafeSearch on (which is enabled by default), they won’t see your website in the SERPs.
- Profanities are banned in Google’s autocomplete algorithms.
- Google censors profanities in voice search. [1]https://www.businessinsider.com/google-is-censoring-swear-words-2015-9
The facts:
- Google doesn’t allow curse words in review snippets schema anymore [2]https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/critic-review
Avoid profanity and vulgar language. Reviews should be appropriate for a broad and diverse audience. Consequently, reviews containing vulgar or profane language may be ineligible for use.
Google Search Central
- The same can be said about structured data for job postings. [3]https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/job-posting
We don’t allow job postings that contain obscene, profane, or offensive language.
Google Search Central
- Q&A and FAQ structured snippets won’t display if there are any bad words in there either. [4]https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/qapage?hl=sr [5]https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/faqpage
Question and answer content may not be displayed as a rich result if it contains any of the following types of content: obscene, profane, sexually explicit, graphically violent, promotion of dangerous or illegal activities, or hateful or harassing language.
Google Search Central
My tip:
Keep it PG-13 100% of the time. No point of risking these rankings for appearing edgy. Google is an advertising company, first and foremost, and advertisers prefer content that is clean.
📖 References