Central Board of Open Schooling and Examination (CBOSE)

Website Publishing Policies & Content Guidelines

Reference document for the official CBOSE web presence — governing how web content is created, reviewed, indexed and surfaced through Google Search, Google News, Google Discover and Google's supplementary platforms.

Document Owner

Director (Information & Communication Technology), CBOSE

Version

1.0

Effective Date

01 September 2026

Review Cycle

Annual (or upon material change to Google policy)

Classification

Public — Open to all stakeholders

1. Introduction and Scope
1. 1.1 Scope
2. Objectives of the Publishing Policy
3. Roles and Responsibilities
4. Content Eligible for Publication on the Site
1. 4.1 Examination and Certification
2. 4.2 Curriculum and Pedagogy
3. 4.3 Institutional and Governance
4. 4.4 Public Engagement
5. Editorial and Writing Standards
1. 5.1 Voice and Tone
2. 5.2 Style Conventions
3. 5.3 Sourcing and Attribution
6. SEO and Google Discovery Configuration
1. 6.1 URL and Permalink Policy
2. 6.2 Title and Meta-Description
3. 6.3 Structured Data (Schema.org)
4. 6.4 Sitemap and Indexing
5. 6.5 Robots and Crawl Directives
7. Google News and Discover Policies
1. 7.1 News Article Minimum Standards
2. 7.2 Discover Content Standards
8. Copyright and Intellectual Property
1. 8.1 Permitted Reuse Without Permission
2. 8.2 Reuse Requiring Written Permission
3. 8.3 Open Educational Resources
4. 8.4 Takedown Procedure
9. Accessibility and Inclusive Design
10. Privacy and Data Protection
11. Editorial Approval Workflow
12. Corrections, Retractions and Updates
13. Page Templates and Components
14. Social Media and Embedded Media
15. Security, Integrity and Anti-Spam
16. Advertising Policy
17. Metrics and Governance
18. Review and Amendment
19. Contact and Escalation

1. Introduction and Scope

The Central Board of Open Schooling and Examination (CBOSE) is the Govt Registered body responsible for delivering open schooling, secondary and senior secondary certification, vocational certification and examining functions across India and overseas learner residencies. Its official website (the “Site”) is the primary public surface for all such information and a critical channel for examination communication.

This document establishes the publishing policy that governs every piece of content placed on the Site as well as how that content is configured to surface correctly in Google Search, Google News, Google Discover, Google Scholar (for research papers), YouTube (the Board's official video channel) and Google's other content platforms.

1.1

Scope

This Policy applies to all CBOSE-controlled digital publishing, including:

The official CBOSE corporate website
CBOSE-affiliated regional and study-centre microsites
Press releases, gazette notifications and circular pages
Examination-result and admit-card landing pages
Syllabus, sample paper and study-material repositories
Embedded YouTube content produced by CBOSE
Google My Business listings for HQ and regional offices

It does NOT govern: learners' private use of Google services, third-party news coverage of CBOSE, or affiliate study-centre sites operating under their own governance.

2. Objectives of the Publishing Policy

The Publishing Policy exists to ensure that every page CBOSE publishes is discoverable, trustworthy, accessible and legally compliant. Specific objectives are:

To make CBOSE information retrievable for learners, parents, educators and invigilators within the first three Google results for the queried term.
To prevent the unauthorised republication of CBOSE-owned examination material, certificates and curriculum content.
To maintain a single canonical source for every public statement issued by the Board, eliminating ambiguity that arises from outdated forwarded copies on third-party sites.
To comply with Google's Webmaster Quality Guidelines, Google News Content Policies and Discover Content Policies in full.
To meet the statutory publication requirements of the Right to Education Act 2009, the ICT Act 2000 (as amended) and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023.

3. Roles and Responsibilities

Role	Primary Responsibility
Director, ICT	Document owner; final approval for publishing policy
Content Committee	Reviews and approves all official pages
Web Operations Team	Day-to-day CMS operations, indexing & schema
Examination Branch	Owns result/admit-card pages and notifications
Legal Cell	Copyright, RTI, defamation and notice-and-takedown
Public Relations Officer	Press releases and Google News submissions
Accessibility Officer	WCAG conformance and alt-text review

4. Content Eligible for Publication on the Site

Only information that falls within the following categories may be published, and each item must be approved under the workflow in Section 11 before it goes live:

4.1

Examination and Certification

Date-sheet and timetables for upcoming examinations
Admit-card and hall-ticket notices
Result notifications, including supplementary results
Rechecking and re-evaluation procedure
Migration, transfer-of-credit and equivalence rules

4.2

Curriculum and Pedagogy

Syllabi for secondary, senior-secondary and vocational streams
Sample question papers and marking schemes
Self-instructional material announcements
Open educational resources (OER) under Creative Commons

4.3

Institutional and Governance

Notification and accreditation of study centres
Vetting committee decisions and annual reports
Tender notices (RFP, RFQ, EOI) and awarded contracts
Vacancy notices, recruitment rules and answer keys

4.4

Public Engagement

Press releases and clarifications
Event announcements (convocations, workshops, webinars)
Newsletter and annual report showcase
Alumni, success-story and case-study media

5. Editorial and Writing Standards

All web content must follow the editorial standards below. These mirror Google's helpful-content guidance and protect the Site's long-term ranking authority.

5.1

Voice and Tone

Use plain, courteous and inclusive English.
Prefer active voice. Examples: “The Board will publish results on 15 June” rather than “Results will be published by the Board on 15 June”.
Use the second person (“you”) for learner-facing content; use the third person (“the Board”) for institutional or governance content.
Avoid exclamation marks, hyperbole and unverifiable claims such as “best”, “leading” or “world-class”.

5.2

Style Conventions

Use ISO date format (15 June 2026, not 6/15/2026 or 15.06.2026). Times use 24-hour IST (10:00 IST, not 10 am). Currency is the Indian Rupee symbol (₹) followed by the amount (₹500).
Spell out the Board name in full on first mention, then “CBOSE” or “the Board” thereafter.
Headings are sentence case. Page titles are sentence case too (“Results | CBOSE”, not “RESULTS | CBOSE”).
Numbers under ten are spelled out in body copy; numerals are used for percentages, monetary figures and dates.

5.3

Sourcing and Attribution

Every factual statement must be traceable to a CBOSE notification, a gazette reference, an Act of Parliament or the minutes of the governing council. The source reference appears as an inline citation and on a References line at the foot of the article.
Statistics must include the year and method of collection. Example: “Pass percentage: 71.2% (1,42,378 of 2,00,402 candidates, June 2026 session).”
Quotations from named officials require signed authorisation from the Public Relations Officer and are reproduced verbatim.

6. SEO and Google Discovery Configuration

6.1

URL and Permalink Policy

All public URLs follow a single canonical form, served over HTTPS with a 301 redirect from any non-canonical equivalents. Each page declares a self-referential <link rel="canonical"> tag and a permanent sitemap entry in sitemap.xml.

Permitted patterns:

/[section]/[topic-slug] — permanent evergreen content
/news/[year]/[short-slug] — dated news, press release items
/notifications/[year]/[notice-id] — gazette/government circulars

Slugs are lowercase, hyphenated, ASCII-only and never include a date, an ID, an arbitrary number or a session indicator.

6.2

Title and Meta-Description

Each page declares a unique <title> of 50 to 60 characters — short enough to render fully in Google's 600-pixel SERP cap. The meta description is between 110 and 155 characters and is a single, human-readable sentence with the primary keyword near the start.

Page titles follow the pattern: “Topic — Section | CBOSE”. Examples:

Secondary Syllabus 2026 — Curriculum | CBOSE

June 2026 Result — Examination | CBOSE

Press Release — Public Relations | CBOSE

6.3

Structured Data (Schema.org)

All pages include JSON-LD structured data validated against the Schema.org vocabulary. The mandatory types are:

Page Type	Required Schema.org Type
Site root and sections	WebSite + Organization
Official press release	NewsArticle (claimed by Organization)
Examination result page	Event + FAQPage
Syllabus / curriculum	Course + LearningResource
Notification / gazette	GovernmentService or Legislation
Vacancy notice	JobPosting
YouTube embedded video	VideoObject

Structured data must validate against the Rich Results Test before publication. The Web Operations Team maintains a regression test suite covering every testable type.

6.4

Sitemap and Indexing

The Site publishes a primary sitemap.xml at /sitemap.xml and section-level sitemaps at /sitemap/[section].xml. Press releases, notifications and result pages are also surfaced under /sitemap-news.xml for Google News and /sitemap-discover.xml under content_type="news" for Google Discover.

Indexing policy:

New evergreen pages: medium — load within 24 hours, indexed within 7 days.
Press releases (Google News): instant publication is enabled during working hours; off-peak delayed by no more than 30 minutes.
Landing pages for an active examination (results, admit cards) are fetched on demand by submitting the URL through Search Console.
Pages removed from publication return HTTP 410 (Gone) within 24 hours and remain in sitemap with <lastmod> preserved for 30 days.

6.5

Robots and Crawl Directives

The /robots.txt file disallows the CMS staging environment, internal search results, learner-portal authenticated routes, and the file-attachment index of large downloadable PDFs. It never blocks the homepage, news, results, syllabus or notification sections — Google's helpful-content systems penalise accidental over-blocking.

Pages that opt out of indexed listing use the meta robots directive noindex,nofollow and are removed from sitemaps. noindex pages are audited quarterly and removed if they no longer serve a private use.

7. Google News and Discover Policies

Press releases and high-impact notifications from CBOSE may appear in Google News and Google Discover. To qualify, every candidate article must satisfy the standards below.

7.1

News Article Minimum Standards

A minimum of 250 words of substantive body content.
A unique, non-promotional headline that does not contain "exclusive", "shocking" or similar clickbait phrasing.
A clearly identified byline — name, designation and email of the publishing officer — and a publication date with timezone offset (Asia/Kolkata).
A 2-3 sentence lead paragraph that answers the 5 Ws (who, what, when, where, why) for the reader.
Embedded imagery that is CBOSE-owned or under written licence; no third-party stock photography unless attributed under a Google-News-compatible licence.

7.2

Discover Content Standards

Discover prioritises web content with high E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). CBOSE news items must therefore declare:

An <article:author> with full credentials in author markup.
An <article:publisher> linking to the official CBOSE masthead.
Inline references to source PDFs, gazette numbers and any accompanying government orders.
At least one high-resolution (1200 × 628 px minimum) poster image with alt text and an explicit image license.

8. Copyright and Intellectual Property

Unless otherwise stated on a given page, all content on the CBOSE Site is © Central Board of Open Schooling and Examination, with all rights reserved. The following reuse permissions apply by default unless a stricter notice is shown on the page.

8.1

Permitted Reuse Without Permission

Quotations of up to 200 words for the purposes of criticism, review or news reporting, provided source attribution is given in the form: "Source: CBOSE, [URL], accessed [date]".
Printing or downloading extracts for personal, non-commercial educational study, provided the material is not reproduced in any subsequent publication.
Linking to public CBOSE pages, with or without deep links.

8.2

Reuse Requiring Written Permission

Reproduction of examination question papers, marking schemes, certificates or mark-sheets — these are governed by separate examination-conduct rules and are NEVER to be republished by third parties without Board consent.
Translation, adaptation, or commercial publication of CBOSE syllabi, study material or self-instructional content.
Use of the CBOSE name, crest or logo in any commercial context, including affiliate marketing, paid courses and merchandise.

8.3

Open Educational Resources

Selected learning resources are released under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike). Each such resource shows an explicit licence badge and a recommended citation. Resources labelled CC BY 4.0 may be reused commercially with attribution and license-link-back.

8.4

Takedown Procedure

Claims of copyright infringement may be sent to copyright@cbose.gov.in. Acknowledgement is issued within three working days; valid claims are actioned within ten working days. Counter-notices follow the procedure laid out in Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, 2000.

9. Accessibility and Inclusive Design

The CBOSE Site conforms to WCAG 2.2 Level AA. Every published page passes the following automated and manual checks before publication.

All images have descriptive alt text; decorative images carry an empty alt attribute (alt="").
All headings follow a strict document outline with no skipped levels (H1 → H2 → H3, never H1 → H3).
All interactive elements (links, buttons, form fields) have accessible names; the tab order matches the visual order.
Body text maintains a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1; large text 3:1. Visitor-facing colour combinations are tested against the three common forms of colour blindness.
All PDFs published on the Site are machine-readable PDFs with tagged headings and an extracted text layer; OCR-only "image PDFs" are not acceptable.
All official videos carry open captions in English and Hindi, plus a downloadable transcript in PDF and DOCX.
Pages are operable with a keyboard only, with a screen reader, and at 200% browser zoom without horizontal scrolling.

10. Privacy and Data Protection

The Site must comply with India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) and with Google's privacy expectations for publisher sites. The following controls apply:

No personal data of learners, invigilators or staff may be published. Result listings refer to candidates only by roll number, never by name or photograph.
All analytical cookies — including Google Analytics 4 — load only after affirmative, granular user consent collected through the Consent Management Platform. The default state is "denied".
Re-marketing tags (Google Ads re-marketing, in particular) are prohibited on learner-portal flows. They may be used only on public recruitment or tender pages and only behind consent.
Children's data (users under 18) is treated as sensitive; no behavioural advertising, no profiling, no third-party sharing. AdSense for Search (AFS) on result-search flows is configured in non-personalised mode for known-school-age cohorts.
A model Privacy Notice and a contactable Data Protection Officer are published at /privacy and /dpo respectively, and are reviewed quarterly against the latest DPDP Rules.

11. Editorial Approval Workflow

All publishing flows through a four-stage workflow in the CBOSE CMS:

Drafting

the content owner composes the page in the CMS using the approved template (see Section 13).

Editorial review

the section editor checks the page for style, factual accuracy, sourcing and accessibility.

Legal review (where required)

the Legal Cell confirms copyright status, RTI considerations and potential defamatory content.

Authorisation and publication

the Director, ICT (or delegated officer) signs off in the CMS and the page is promoted to production. Publication time, approver identity and content hash are recorded for audit.

Time-sensitive items (results, admit cards, exam-day disruptions) use a Fast-Track workflow that collapses Editorial and the Director's sign-off into a single stage, with mandatory post-publication Legal Cell review within 24 hours.

12. Corrections, Retractions and Updates

Accuracy is non-negotiable. The following rules apply to every page under CBOSE control:

Minor corrections (typos, dates, factual addenda) are applied in-place with a clearly labelled “Updated on [date]:” note at the top of the page; lastmod in sitemap.xml is updated and Search Console is notified.
Material corrections to news articles follow Google's News Content Policies: a Corrigendum note is appended under a correction heading with the timestamp and a clear description of the original statement and the corrected statement.
Retractions are reserved for demonstrably false statements that have already been syndicated. A Retraction page replaces the original article; a Retic-17 response code is returned; and the original URL is preserved as a 301 redirect to the retraction so backlinks stop carrying misinformation.
Archival policy: a page older than seven years and unedited in the last three is reviewed by the Content Committee for continued relevance, republication, or 410 retirement.

13. Page Templates and Components

The CBOSE CMS enforces the following compulsory components on every page; publishing a page that omits any of them raises a block error:

Title block	sentence-case heading, sub-heading, last-updated stamp.
Breadcrumb	Home > Section > Sub-section > Page.
Body	primary content with at least one figure (image, table, chart or VideoObject) for pages longer than 1,000 words.
Sidebar (where appropriate)	“On this page” anchor list, “Related notifications”, “Download as PDF”.
Footer	document reference, copyright statement, “Report an error” link to web-feedback@cbose.gov.in, last reviewed date.
Structured data	automatically generated from the page type but editable for advanced cases (see Section 6.3).

14. Social Media and Embedded Media

CBOSE maintains official, verified accounts on the platforms below. Content from these accounts may be embedded on the Site under platform-specific publishers' terms; the Site does not embed non-official CBOSE-tagged accounts.

Platform	Account	Embed policy
YouTube	youtube.com/@cbose-official	Allowed via official <iframe>
X (Twitter)	x.com/cbose_official	Allowed via nitter/approved mirror
Facebook	facebook.com/CBOSE.In	Allowed; metadata-only fallback
Instagram	instagram.com/cbose_official	Static embed; no auto-feed
LinkedIn	linkedin.com/company/cbose	Static embed; no auto-feed

Embedded posts are subject to the same Editorial review (Section 5) and Privacy review (Section 10) as native content before being included on a CBOSE page.

15. Security, Integrity and Anti-Spam

The Site adopts Google's recommended anti-spam and integrity controls:

Pages carry a Content-Security-Policy, an X-Frame-Options header and a Strict-Transport-Security header. Mixed content is blocked at the load balancer.
All contact and feedback forms are protected by CAPTCHA (reCAPTCHA v3 or hCaptcha) and rate-limited at the WAF.
User-generated content (Q&A forums, learner feedback threads) is pre-moderated by the Web Operations Team and hidden from indexing until approved.
Automated backlink schemes, comment-spam, doorway pages, cloaking and link farms are expressly forbidden for any CBOSE-controlled subdomain.
Search Console is monitored by the Web Operations Team; manual-actions, security issues and coverage errors are investigated the same day and remediated within seven days.

16. Advertising Policy

CBOSE does not host third-party display advertising on the Site. Where an internal search-results page is monetised through Google AdSense for Search (AFS), the configuration:

Blocks ads in categories associated with coaching centres, private tuition services and parallel certification schemes that may mislead learners.
Applies sensitive-category exclusions for ads that target users below 18 years of age.
Marks the search-results page as "Sponsored results present" so users can distinguish editorial from monetised listings.

17. Metrics and Governance

The publishing programme is governed by the following reviewed indicators:

Metric	Source	Target
Indexed URL ratio	Google Search Console	≥ 99%
Median time to indexed	Search Console	≤ 48 hours
Press release in News	News Performance Report	100% within 30 min
Discover impressions	Search Console	Up ≥ 10% YoY
Lighthouse Performance	Lighthouse CI	≥ 90 mobile
Lighthouse Accessibility	Lighthouse CI	100
WCAG AA failures	Manual audit	0 critical / 0 serious

18. Review and Amendment

This Policy is reviewed annually by the Document Owner, with interim revisions triggered by:

Material change to Google's Search or News guidelines
Material change to the DPDP Act or its Rules
A documented incident with reputational or legal impact
A directive from the Board or the Ministry of Education

Amendments follow the same Editorial Approval Workflow described in Section 11. A version history of this document is published at /about/publishing-policies/history.