• Google will phase out third-party cookies in the Chrome browser by mid-2023.
• Google has rolled out the robots indexifembedded tag, giving webmasters more control over when their content is indexed.

The Privacy Sandbox Initiative

Google announced the Privacy Sandbox initiative in 2019 to “Build a thriving, user-friendly, and private-by-default web ecosystem.”

To accomplish this mission, the Privacy Sandbox already employs a set of privacy-conscious methods that will refuse third-party cookies used to track user behavior on websites and across the web and replace them with “Technologies that both protect the privacy of people online and give businesses and developers the tools to build thriving digital businesses to keep the web open and accessible to everyone, now and in the future.”

Google is following a multi-phase public development process to implement these changes. Development began in early 2021 with the first release of FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) – technology that improves privacy, giving publishers, marketers and advertising the tools they need for business models viable advertisers. Main features of FLoC:

• anonymous site and web browsing;
• showing relevant ads to large groups, or “cohorts” defined by similarities in browsing history;
• no sharing of users’ browsing history with companies and advertisers;
• recommend content based on the interest of a specific cohort;
• use machine learning to predict conversions.

Google will begin implementing strategies to phase out support for third-party cookies in two stages, starting in late 2022. This will give you time to study the documentation and prepare for adoption. This stage will take about nine months and will end with Chrome phasing out third-party cookie support in late 2023.

Currently, advertisers and marketers rely on third-party cookies to measure the reach and effectiveness of advertisements. With the new Privacy Sandbox initiative, Google will introduce additional methods to protect user anonymity, by learning data about groups, not individuals. The Privacy Sandbox will also offer tools to fight spam and online fraud by distinguishing real users from bots or malicious attackers, all without tracking people.

The key takeaway from this Chrome privacy update is that digital marketers, advertisers, and publishers should migrate their services to privacy-compliant platforms in time to avoid interruptions or disruptions. of their marketing, advertising and publishing schedules.

New Robots tag: indexifembedded

Google introduced its new indexifembedded robots tag on January 21, 2022. What indexifembedded means is quite simple: index if embedded. Essentially, with the new robots indexifembedded tag, Google allows publishers to signal web crawlers to index embedded content via iframes and HTML tags (like the external element

For example, when publishers don’t want media pages to be indexed, they use a noindex tag, preventing bots from embedding content into other pages when indexing. The indexifembedded tag replaces the noindex tag, but only for embedded content. So when publishers don’t want an entire media page to be indexed, but want Googlebot to index the embedded part, they can use indexifembedded in combination with the noindex tag and ensure that embedded content on third-party sites is indexed. . There are two ways to achieve this goal:

X-Robots-Tag: googlebot:noindex
X-Robots-Tag: googlebot:indexifembedded
...
OR
…
X-Robots-Tag: googlebot:noindex,indexifembedded

So, if you want Googlebot to index the content you create and have third-party sites embed it for reference in their pages, indexifembedded will allow it:

For example, if podcast.host.example/playpage?podcast=12345 contains both the noindex and indexifembedded tags, this means that Google can embed content hosted on that page in recipe.site.example/my-recipes.html when of indexing.

New robots tag: indexifembedded, Google Search Central

Although only Google supports the indexifembedded tag right now, you can expect other bots to follow suit, as Google is essentially a pioneer in all things SEO.