Can a few non-safe words prevent my site from appearing in SafeSearch results?

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: We have a fun question from Philipp Lenssen in Germany. Philipp says, if you run a family friendly site which however every now and then mentions an adult word (e.g. because the word is ambiguous or just happens to be about sex education etc.), do you risk getting kicked out of the Google SafeSearch results zone? Well, it’s on a spectrum, right? And on one hand you have completely, you know, non-porn stuff, on the other hand you have completely porn stuff. And it’s perfectly normal for a site to occasionally mention breast if you’re talking about breast cancer or sex if you’re talking about sex education. So we try to write our algorithm such that just having a single word mentioned here or there really won’t have that much of an impact. Now, of course some words are worse than others. If you got some slang or something that’s misspelled and really is not a word that you can repeat in polite company that makes it more likely that that page will get flagged. But in most cases you should be in relatively good shape as long as most of your content or most of the words on your page are family friendly. A good example of this is the Neil Gaiman book, Stardust. The whole book is more like a fairy tale written for teens. So, it’s very PG 13, PG, completely fine except for one single word where a star falls to Earth and the star is a human and she’s like, and she curses for just one word. That’s not the sort of thing where you want to call the entire book unfamily safe just because of that one word. It’s like 250 page book, one word. So we do try to have things on a relatively good scale so that if you only occasionally mention things or, you know, if you’re talking about sex education or, you know, medical related thing that that won’t automatically trigger SafeSearch and you don’t need to worry about that.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: