Amazon Search Shadowban For Products That Violate Title Guidelines

While most Amazon sellers are familiar with suppressed listings, which hide listings from shoppers that do not meet Amazon’s product information standards, many may not be aware of the search suppression Amazon imposes on listings with titles that do not meet its guidelines.

What is Search Suppression?

Think along the lines of what we see happening on social media platforms like Instagram, where posts are shadowbanned if a user’s content violates community guidelines or is deemed inappropriate in any way. Then, Instagram will hide or restrict that content without any warning or notification, and it means that the post won’t show up on other users’ Instagram news feeds, while the person who posted the content will be none the wiser.

The suppressed searches on Amazon work in a very similar manner, and Amazon has gone so far as to state that it will hide any items sold under high-risk categories (those where Amazon is more likely to suffer from liability issues) with titles containing restricted keywords from searches.

What is restricted remains somewhat ambiguous as Amazon tends to add new restricted keywords often without warning and only has a shortlist of restricted keywords on their official list, yet suspends accounts for many terms far outside that list.

However, we do know that titles containing promotional keywords and phrases like “free shipping” or “100% quality guaranteed” are prime candidates for search suppression. So are those with non-readable characters, including emojis and titles exceeding more than the allowable character length, usually 200 but can vary per category or sub-category. Of course, titles not containing any product identifying information are equally likely to face the same fate.

The tricky part with all of this is that Amazon, it seems, will likely never notify you when they have enforced search suppression on one of your listings, just as Instagram shadowban posts without a word.

Product Types that May Be Suppressed from Search

The complete list of sensitive categories on Amazon includes Alcoholic Beverage, Baby Product, Beauty, Cleaning Product, Consumer Electronics, Food And Beverage, Gifts And Occasions, Health Personal Care, Home, Kitchen, Luggage, Paper Product, Party Supplies, Pet Supplies, Prescription Eyewear, and Tobacco And Cannabis Products.

If you have any listing that falls under these categories, you should be extra careful to ensure you have followed all of Amazon’s title guidelines for its US and EU marketplaces. 

Why is Amazon Suppressing Searches Rather than Just Listing Suspensions?

From our assessment, it seems that Amazon wants to remove accountability by hiding listings that shoppers are searching for if they deem a listing to violate its terms. Another part of their focus on Amazon customer experience being of the utmost importance.

However, the product remains available to buy on Amazon, and sellers can continue to drive external traffic to their listing via other off-Amazon marketing strategies. Amazon would not want to miss out on a new customer and the traffic you may be sending to Amazon. They may allow you to make sales using your own traffic efforts to your own potential customers, but they don’t want you giving their current customers a potentially negative experience through misrepresentation of products or non-compliant titling.

Search suppression is an interesting and potentially hard to identify, an issue that could make figuring out why you are not making more sales quite difficult. So knowing and adhering to this policy is important.

If you want to find out more about search suppression and which of your ASINs may be affected, log in to your Seller Central account and open Inventory > Manage Inventory > Listing Quality Dashboard.