Google adds new robots tag indexifembedded

Google has a new robots tag for when you use embedded content on your pages named indexifembedded. Google said with this new tag “you can tell Google you’d still like your content indexed when it’s embedded through iframes and similar HTML tags in other pages, even when the content page has the noindex tag.”

Why we care. If you embed content on your site and want to control indexing of the content on the page, now you have more control with this new indexifembedded robots tag. Give it a try and see if it helps you with any indexing issues you may have had with pages where you embed content.

Why a new tag. Google explained that sometimes publishers want the content on the page to be indexed and sometimes not, when they embed content. This new robots tag gives you more control over communicating those wishes to Google Search.

“The indexifembedded tag addresses a common issue that especially affects media publishers: while they may want their content indexed when it’s embedded on third-party pages, they don’t necessarily want their media pages indexed on their own,” Google said, “Because they don’t want the media pages indexed, they currently use a noindex tag in such pages. However, the noindex tag also prevents embedding the content in other pages during indexing.”

Noindex and indexifembedded. Google said this new indexifembedded tag works with the original noindex tag: “The new robots tag, indexifembedded, works in combination with the noindex tag only when the page with noindex is embedded into another page through an iframe or similar HTML tag, like object.”

The example Google gave was if podcast.host.example/playpage?podcast=12345 has both the noindex and indexifembedded tag, it means Google can embed the content hosted on that page in recipe.site.example/my-recipes.html during indexing.

Code examples. Here are code examples of how to implement it, the first is via normal meta robots tag and the second is via the x-robots implementation:

Other search engines. It seems Google is the only search engine to currently support this new robots meta tag.

Why use it? I asked John Mueller of Google why would anyone use this? I am still not sure I am convinced but this is what he said:

About The Author

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry’s personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.