Medical Marijuana Keywords

[eocreative]

Has anyone seen any evidence of Google penalizing for Medical Marijuana related keywords in states where that is legal?

Thanks in advance.

[RyanPurkey]

There's not much on this in sourced material other than some mentions in places like: http://www.google.com/goodtoknow/familysafety/advice/#behaviors, "Set age-appropriate filters on your computers and your child’s mobile devices: Filters and other internet safety tools block categories of inappropriate websites a child can view, such as sites containing pornography, violence, gambling, and illegal drug information."  Google's SafeSearch is primarily focused on pornography.  And the filters mentioned in the link above are in reference to installs on local machines.

Is there some filter going on though?  Try typing, 'california medical marijuana' into the search bar and notice where suggested search ends...  Obviously at this moment in time there's a legal gray area for this topic as a few states have made medical and recreational use legal, while federally it is still illegal in the US. And right now, search tends to mirror that grayness as well.

[eocreative]

Thanks for responding Ryan.

Google seems pretty vague on this and this is just a part of one of our client's business so we don't want to optimize in a way that could get his whole site penalized or discredited.

[DirkC]

Hi,

Just did a quick check on a few marijuana related keywords in Semrush. Don't know if they are really penalising the keywords, top results always seem to be a mix of (governmental) information, and sites where pro/contra are discussed:

• wikipedia
  - http://medicalmarijuana.procon.org/
  - http://www.drugpolicy.org/medical-marijuana
• http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/state-medical-marijuana-laws.aspx
• http://norml.org/legal/medical-marijuana-2
• http://www.azdhs.gov/medicalmarijuana/

I guess that unless the queries are very specific (like: buy medical marijuana online) it will be very difficult to get high positions in the SERP's.

I would assume that the risk of having this content on your site is pretty low, especially if your content is balanced (pro/contra). We manage the biggest health site in the Netherlands (where recreational use of marijuana is allowed since quite some time). While marijuana is not really our top keyword, we do have like 120 articles/news items published and it does not seem to do any harm (as our organic traffic continues to grow).

Hope this helps,

Dirk