New robots tag: indexifembedded  |  Google Search Central Blog  |  Google Developers

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.

Posted by Weizi Wang and Gary Illyes