README

The reach of a public record, as the person it is about decides it: listed, kept out of search engines, or unlisted.

phil/indexing-consent is a small contract between a public record and what reads it beyond its own page. A record — a profile, a listing in a directory, a post signed with a name — implements HasIndexingConsent and answers with an Indexing: Listed, everywhere; NotIndexed, on the site and in its listings but out of search engines, the sitemap and the structured data; Unlisted, reachable only by its address. Each reader asks allows() with what it is: the sitemap leaves out what it may not list, the structured data says nothing of it, the directory hides it from its listings, and the page tells robots noindex, noarchive.

It exists because a person may no longer want a record about them to be found by their name — privacy laws such as Québec's Law 25 give them the right to have it de-indexed — without asking the site to remove it. The choice lives on the record; every reader asks the same question and gets the same answer, so that withdrawing a record from search engines does not depend on each reader remembering to.

It is a plain PHP library with no dependency. It stores nothing and renders nothing: the application keeps the choice on its record, and the readers — a sitemap, the structured data of a page, a directory — ask it. A page carries the choice of the record it shows on its request, under IndexingPolicy::REQUEST_ATTRIBUTE, so that its other readers get the same answer; phil/structured-data-bundle then prints no JSON-LD, and phil/directory-bundle keeps its listings to what their authors chose.

Status

Part	State
`Indexing`, `Reader`	Implemented and tested
`HasIndexingConsent`	Contract
`IndexingPolicy`	Implemented and tested

Documentation

Document	What it covers
Reference	The values, what each reader is answered, the robots directives, the strictest of two choices.
Extension points	The contract a record implements, and how a reader asks it.
Testing	How the library is tested.

Quick start

final class Profile implements HasIndexingConsent
{
    public function __construct(private Indexing $indexing = Indexing::Listed)
    {
    }

    public function indexing(): Indexing
    {
        return $this->indexing;
    }
}

$profile = new Profile(Indexing::NotIndexed);

IndexingPolicy::allows($profile, Reader::Sitemap);      // false
IndexingPolicy::allows($profile, Reader::SiteListings); // true
$profile->indexing()->robots();                         // 'noindex, noarchive'

foreach (IndexingPolicy::filter($profiles, Reader::Sitemap) as $listed) {
    // add $listed to the sitemap
}

Requirements

PHP 8.5 or later.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome on the PHIL monorepo: read the contribution guide and the code of conduct. Report a vulnerability privately, as the security policy explains, never in a public issue.

phil / indexing-consent

Package info

Security

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