Why it matters
notranslate, as a robots or googlebot rule or in X-Robots-Tag, opts a page out of all translation features in Google Search, and the meta tag named google with notranslate also turns off Chrome's automatic translation for visitors who cannot read the language. noimageindex stops Google indexing every image on the page; said at Search Central Live, it also affects the page's videos, because Google has to index a video's thumbnail, which is an image. Both are often inherited from templates without a reason.
How to meet it
Remove notranslate and noimageindex from global templates. Where a specific passage must not be translated, the standard HTML translate="no" attribute on that element is narrower than a page-wide rule. To keep specific images out of Search, use DEV-IMG-06.
How to test it
A crawl lists every robots, googlebot or google meta tag and X-Robots-Tag header containing notranslate or noimageindex, and each one has a documented reason.
How Regensbot covers it
Decided from one URL.
An audit reads the response, the headers, the HTML, robots.txt, the sitemaps and the structured data, and the finding shows the evidence it saw.
Sources
Google documents04
- 01Translated results in Google SearchGoogle Search Central (opens in a new tab)
- 02Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag specificationsGoogle Search Central (opens in a new tab)
- 03Helping you break the language barrierSearch Central blog (14 October 2008) (opens in a new tab)
- 04TranslateThe Chromium Projects (opens in a new tab)
Claims in the knowledge base08
- D2-C093ConfirmedControlling indexingSaid on stage
- D2-C095SourceControlling indexingGoogle's documentation
- D2-C094ConsistentControlling indexingSaid on stage
- D2-C096SourceControlling indexingGoogle's documentation
- D2-C099ConfirmedControlling indexingSaid on stage
- D2-C098n/aControlling indexingThe author's interpretation
- D2-C934ConfirmedUsing images to your advantage and Engaging Search users with videosSaid on stage
- D2-C935UndocumentedUsing images to your advantage and Engaging Search users with videosSaid on stage
Claim IDs refer to the Search Central Live 2026 knowledge base. The knowledge base (opens in a new tab)
- Confirmed
- Google's documentation states the same thing.
- Consistent
- Google's documentation supports it without stating it.
- Undocumented
- Said or shown at the event, not in the documentation.
- Source
- The claim is the cited document itself.
- n/a
- Nothing to verify: a quotation, framing, opinion or analysis.