Will profanity on your site hurt your rankings?

[anon123]

It's mostly non-affensive.

Just people adding those 4 letter words for emphasis.

But could allowing it hurt your rankings in Google?

I don't mind if people throw the F and S bomb here and there, so long as it's just used like "That's F'in awesome!".

I noticed that some Wiki articles have "bad words" and it doesn't seem to hurt those article's rankings.

But will certain pages not show up for the 'regular searcher' if Google finds it has bad words?

[tedster]

I've never seen a case where the mere presence of profanity caused a ranking problem. For people who have re-set their Safe Search filtering to strict, pages with explicit text will be filtered out, but that's not a penalty. It's also not the default behavior.