Frontend Robots

Accidentally indexed staging environments are a common and expensive problem: duplicate content competing with the live site, internal drafts surfacing in search results, and clean-up work that takes weeks. This indicator signals the environment to crawlers so non-production content does not end up in search engines in the first place.

It adds an X-Robots-Tag header to every frontend response:

X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow

Browser devtools network panel showing the X-Robots-Tag response header

You can register the indicator in your ext_localconf.php:

ext_localconf.php

use KonradMichalik\Typo3EnvironmentIndicator\Configuration\Handler;
use KonradMichalik\Typo3EnvironmentIndicator\Configuration\Indicator;
use KonradMichalik\Typo3EnvironmentIndicator\Configuration\Trigger;

Handler::addIndicator(
    triggers: [
        new Trigger\ApplicationContext('Testing/Staging')
    ],
    indicators: [
        new Indicator\Frontend\Robots()
    ]
);

Additional optional configuration keys:

content (string): The header value. Default is noindex, nofollow. A value that is not valid per 9110 is ignored and logged as a warning.

Warning

This indicator changes how search engines treat the site. Never trigger it in a production context — a noindex on the live site removes it from search results. Restrict it to non-production contexts via its triggers and double-check the trigger configuration before deploying.

Note

Unlike the other indicators, this one is not part of the default configuration presets and never will be. Silently changing the SEO behaviour of an existing installation on update would be unacceptable, so the indicator only ever does something if you register it yourself.

Note

The X-Robots-Tag header is used instead of a <meta name="robots"> tag on purpose: unlike the meta tag it also covers non-HTML resources such as PDFs, images and feeds, which are otherwise indexed even on a staging system.

Note

An X-Robots-Tag that is already present on the response keeps precedence — the indicator never overwrites it. The same header handling rules as for Frontend HTTP Header apply.

The X-Robots-Tag header can be disabled globally via the extension configuration.