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(Archived) Why is “max-image-preview:none” purged?

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Revised on

Update – February 3rd, 2020: This bug has been fixed. You can safely use this directive without side-effects.

Archived: Nothing on this page is applicable since The SEO Framework v4.0.5.

We found that when using the robots directive max-image-preview:none in combination with noarchive or nofollow, Google Search will render the robots meta contents as such:

<meta name="robots" content="none" />

none is equivalent to noindex,nofollow, and that means your page will be removed from Google Search, which is not our intention. The cause of this issue is probably due to a regex bug in Google’s parser. We informed Google via Twitter, but it went unnoticed.

So, from The SEO Framework v4.0.3, when you apply noarchive or nofollow to any page, the max-image-preview:none directive will be purged from it. This change will prevent your pages getting taken off from Google Search unintentionally.