I recently attended an online webinar where the subject of banned hashtags used on Instagram could have a negative effect on the growth of your account. This was of interest to me as I’ll be honest I had not come across this before even though I am a great advocate of hashtag research.

In fairness Instagram is super keen to stamp out dodgy accounts and spam on the platform and banning some hashtags that have been hijacked is one of their techniques.

Using these banned hashtags on your posts can damage your engagement on your Instagram account.

Some of the banned hashtags are only temporary some though are permanent.

If you continue to use these on your account, the reduction in engagement will be noticeable and could get you a little ban from the platform owners. And no-one wants this!

The responsibility us down to you to find out these banned hashtags and take the necessary precautions not to include them in your posts. There is no easy way to do this and is down to your own efforts as part of your hashtag word research (which you should be doing anyway).

To discover if they are banned, go to Instagram.

Search for a specific hashtag in the search bar.

After clicking on the hashtag, scroll through the pictures. If you reach an end-point with a message saying “recent posts from #ADDINSTAGRAMHASHTAG here are currently hidden because the community has reported some content that may not meet Instagram’s community guidelines.” If that is the case, do not use and move on.

Searching for individual banned hashtags can be easily be done via Instagram itself, but if you find you need to search for bulk hashtags and wish to go back through all of your posts then there are tools out there you can subscribe (usually with a fee) to search and collect these for you. The paid versions have the benefits of realtime checking, so for real issues, it might be worth looking into those.

Looking back at your account, that is why it is worth cleaning your profile from the sins of the past.

For photos for which the banned hashtag appears in the description, it is best to edit the photo and delete the banned hashtag used in the description.

Deleting photos is not recommended.

Instagram uses a machine learning system and by changing data on your profile in such a drastic way, you introduce chaos through which it must “learn you” again.

Here is a list of most recent and regular banned Hashtags to consider.

*List courtesy of https://markitors.com/

So, I will certainly be looking back at my Instagram feed and assessing some of those I know I have used in the past #ValentinesDay and using this as a guide for future posts. If you are interested in finding out more, please do contact me at [email protected] or call me on 01642 712817. For other blogs on social media platforms, please look here

Please follow and like us: