Google's John Mueller said that he does not believe that rich results would work in Google Search for adult oriented web sites. But if you read the guidelines for rich results, only the critic review and product rich results specifically say adult web sites are not allowed, the rest, there is no mention of it.
At the 1 hour 6 minute and 35 second mark into a Google SEO hangout from December 11th, John was asked if rich results work on adult web sites. The question was:
With adult websites, it's very unclear which sort of schema is basically allowed there, because in some articles you mentioned that this schema is definitely not allowed for adult websites, but the majority of it is just not mentioned. So how can an adult website do this? Should they just implement everything and hope for the best? Or how can we actually know which one is important and which one not? For example, the live one. Live is useful on blogs nowadays, on some podcasts, but adult websites cannot use live. But it's not written there that it's not supported. So how can we know?
John responded that he does not believe rich results work on adult web sites. I did not check myself... John said at the 1:07:12 mark:
I think in our rich results guidelines we say none of them are useful for adult websites. But I haven't checked recently. I don't know if anything has changed there. But at least as far as I know, all of the types of rich results that I'm aware of are explicitly not meant for adult content websites.
The rich result guidelines do not mention any adult related topics. But if you drill through each specific rich result type, only two mention that adult is disallowed. The critic review rich result guidelines say "Don't add critic review structured data for adult-related products or services." The product rich result guidelines say "Adult-related products are not supported."
As Lily Ray pointed out also on Twitter, the main guidelines do not say anything about no adult content.
TL;DR to my previous post:
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) December 21, 2020
~ Google is in fact not showing *any* Rich Results for a client that has *some* adult content (medical!) on its site. ~
Interesting to see that "adult content" is not listed as a violation in Google's Structured Data documentation. pic.twitter.com/BOk5MFiMDh
Are any of the pages being filtered by SafeSearch? I believe that's what John was referring to. Google has also pulled back on FAQ snippets (like you mentioned), so it could have been part of that. Hard to say w/out knowing the site and content!
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) December 21, 2020
Here is the video embed at the start time, where the question was asked:
Again, I did not dig through the search results to find rich results that show up on adult oriented sites. But some of you might know if it is much harder for adult sites, where Google labels the site with the SafeSerch filter, can show rich results in the search results.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
