Friday, January 21, 2022
Today, we're introducing a new robots tag,
indexifembedded
,
that brings you more control over when your content is indexed. With the
indexifembedded
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.
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. 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.
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
.
For example, 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.
To enable your content to be indexed only when it's embedded on other pages, make sure to add
indexifembedded
in combination with the noindex
tag. For example:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex" /> <meta name="googlebot" content="indexifembedded" /> <!-- OR --> <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex,indexifembedded" />
Alternatively, you can specify the tag in the HTTP header:
X-Robots-Tag: googlebot:noindex X-Robots-Tag: googlebot:indexifembedded ... OR … X-Robots-Tag: googlebot:noindex,indexifembedded
Presently, only Google supports the indexifembedded
tag.
We hope you find this new tag useful. If you have questions or comments, find us on Twitter and in our Help Forums.