[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #51511: Introduce Robots API and Media Search Engine Visibility setting

[WordPress Trac]

#51511: Introduce Robots API and Media Search Engine Visibility setting
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 Reporter:  flixos90                             |       Owner:  flixos90
     Type:  feature request                      |      Status:  assigned
 Priority:  normal                               |   Milestone:  5.7
Component:  General                              |     Version:
 Severity:  normal                               |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  has-patch has-unit-tests needs-      |     Focuses:
  copy-review needs-dev-note                     |
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Changes (by flixos90):

 * keywords:  has-patch has-unit-tests needs-copy-review => has-patch has-
     unit-tests needs-copy-review needs-dev-note
 * milestone:  Awaiting Review => 5.7


Comment:

 @helen @Clorith I'm happy to revise whether we'd need this checkbox and
 (if we do) how to make its purpose more clear. I agree that this is a
 control for something quite specific that we generally try to avoid in
 core. Similarly though, there was a strong push to expose a UI control for
 this as a follow-up on the original
 [https://make.wordpress.org/core/2020/09/15/enhancing-image-preview-core-
 proposal/ announcement post] (which didn't initially include that part).

 > Another question I have is - why would a user ever want to discourage
 large media usage for search engines? What would the problem be with large
 media that they would want to turn that off?

 I'd say that 99% of users would not want to discourage large media usage.
 But then there's a fraction (likely mostly larger publishers) that for
 legal reasons would discourage it (copyright on those images). The
 announcement post and [https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/more-
 controls-on-search.html this post linked from there] provide some more
 context.

 If we knew that it's indeed primarily larger publishers that would benefit
 from the option to discourage, I think it would be easy to argue that a
 filter alone is sufficient (assuming they have active development
 resources). But for smaller individually managed sites having the checkbox
 might be useful. Alternatively, we could avoid the checkbox and instead
 point to some one-liner plugin for those sites that prefer to discourage.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/51511#comment:8>
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