Google Has Announced a New Robots Tag- Indexifembedded. Here’s All You Need to Know

Posted on 9 Feb 2022

Google has introduced a new robots tag that can be applied when you use embedded content on your websites. The robots tag, better known as Indexifembedded enable you to have more direction over which content of your website should be indexed in search results. This means you can now control the indexing of your content when it is embedded through iframes or other means such as HTML tags.

This new Indexiembedded tag overrides the noindex tag. Thus, you can use the noindex tag for keeping a URL out of the search results on SERPs. Then, the Indexifembedded tag can be used to index a specific piece of content when it is embedded on another webpage.

According to Google, at times, publishers want some information to be indexed, and sometimes they don’t. With the new robots tag, you can have greater control over how Google Search receives such requests.

“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”

When Should You Use the Indexifembedded Tag?

The new robots tag may not apply to a lot of publishers. This is because it is intended for content with a separate URL for embedding purposes.

Let’s take a publisher of a podcast as an example. They may have separate web pages dedicated to each audio episode that have their own URLs. Thereafter, there will be different URLs pointing directly to the media, which can be utilised by other websites for embedding the audio on their pages. While entering a podcast episode as a reference source, such a URL might get used. It is also possible that the publisher does not want the media URLs to appear in the search results, and they made use of the noindex tag to keep them out of search on google.

However, the noindex tag forbids embedding of content in other pages during indexing. Therefore, if a publisher intends to enable embedding, they will be forced to have the media URL indexed too.

Conclusion: With the Indexifembedded tag, publishers can control what should be indexed. The tag can also be utilised with the noindex tag. However, it will override the noindex tag when a URL with noindex is embedded into another page through an iframe or similar HTML tag.

Currently, only Google is supporting the Indexiembedded tag.

Code examples: Here are two examples of how to implement the new robots tag, first via normal meta robots, and second via the x-robot implementation.