Google had made a few changes to its SEO developer help documentation. First it documented how Google Search handles and processes robots meta tags outside the HTML head. Second, it added more supported properties for Discussion Forum and QA Page markup.
(1) Google updated its robots meta tags documentation to add:
Note: Google Search doesn't enforce placement of meta robots in the HTML head and will respect robots meta tags in the body section of an HTML document as well.
Google said "behavior didn't change but was previously undocumented."
(2) Google also added new supported properties for Discussion Forum and QA Page markup.
I tried to do a compare of the old and new documents but the Wayback Machine was down at the time, but you can compare yourself.
Google said it made this update in order to provide "more clarity on comment thread structure to Google ingestion systems. This prevents misinterpretations in our handling of forum and Q&A content."
Forum discussion at X.
