Google has told us that you want to avoid buying a domain name that was filtered by the Google SafeSearch adult filter. Well, servers.com had this issue and after asking Google to remove the filter, Google did so in about a month of time. Plus, Google has a new notice to let searchers know that some results may be explicit and you can filter it out with SafeSearch.
Someone from Servers.com went into the Google Webmaster Help forums and asked how can a site become unfiltered by the SafeSearch filter. He said "I'm trying to get to the bottom of a problem that I have with Google Safe Search. My website shows up in an unfiltered safe search but once I activate the safe search it shows no results. I've read many articles on why websites are removed from a Google safe search but nothing I'm reading seems to relate to why my website is failing as it has nothing of any explicit nature at all. Has anyone else had a similar issue and fixed it?"
That was posted on November 9th and then Caio Barros from Google flagged the issue on November 11th saying "I flagged this to the Search team. Unfortunately SafeSearch information is confidential (even for me) so the only thing we can do now is wait. If your website is ok, it should show up with SafeSearch on eventually."
Then on December 8th, almost a month later, Caio Barros said the site is now no longer filtered, he said "Mark, seems to be appearing with SafeSearch on now! Can you confirm, please?"
So it took Google about a month to reclassify the site out of the SafeSearch adult filter.
With that, last week, I was notified that Google has a new notice at the top of some search results where if the SafeSearch filter can help filter out explicit content and results, Google will let you know it exists.
Here is what it looks like:
I asked on Twitter if this is new after Álvaro Peña notified me and many people told me it was new.
I've actually been seeing this for the past week or so on non-explicit searches. I was kinda surprised but ignored it. I assumed it was a glitch.
— Carolyn Lyden (she/her) (@CarolynLyden) December 7, 2021
Back to the original part of this story, it is actually refreshing to see it only take a month for Google to reclassify a site as not being adult oriented.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
