Banned Hashtags

Hashtags are a great way to draw some attention to your Instagram posts and have been around for awhile now. Did you know there were banned hashtags? These are hashtags that Instagram users have reported because the posts they were used on violated Instagram community guidelines. You do not want to use the banned hashtags or your post will be hidden and it will affect your organic reach.

These hashtags include some pretty obvious ones such as “nudity” and “selfharm” but they also include some surprising ones such as “hardworkpaysoff” or “skype”. Granted you are not going to use those words every day, but you could innocently use them on occasion. As an example, we just finished a successful #skype training.

There are a few ways that you can check to see which words are on this list. One is to simply Google banned hashtags and you will see several posts listing these words. A great example is this post “a complete list of banned hashtags you should avoid in 2023”.

The other way to check if a hashtag is banned is by clicking on it under your post. If it is an acceptable hashtag it will link to a list of posts using that word or phrase. If it is banned it will tell you. For example, if we use the hashtag “nudity” it will display “Recent posts for #nudity are hidden because some posts may not follow Instagram’s Community Guidelines.”

Realistically the list of banned hashtags is not very large, so the likelihood of mistakenly including one is not a big concern. So why worry about it then? As mentioned, any post using a banned hashtag will be hidden. You could have the most well written post that has the potential to bring you lots of traffic, only for it to be hidden because of a hashtag. Now that would be frustrating.

In addition, I am sure there are many people out there who had no idea there was even such a thing as banned hashtags. These same people have brilliant posts that are not getting any reach and they cannot figure out why. Well now you know.