Just Released: Indexifembedded Robots Tag

Google just released a new robots tag to address a common issue that affects media publishers. The Indexifembedded Robots tag that works with the noindex tag.
Marie Aquino
January 22, 2022

Google just released a new robots tagged called indexifembedded that provides more control over when content is indexed.

With this new robots tag, you are able to tell Google that you would like the content to be indexed when it’s embedded through an iframe and other similar HTML tags in other pages. This is even when the content page with the embed has a noindex tag.

This new robots tag was released to address a common issue that affects media publishers. This is in instances when the publishers want their content indexed when it’s embedded on third-party pages, but then they do not want their media pages indexed on their own.

Currently, the noindex tag is used in such pages where they don’t want the media pages indexed. The problem with this is that the noindex tag also prevents embedding the content in other pages during indexing.

According to the Google Search Central Blog:

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.

The indexifembedded is used in combination with the noindex tag and is added in the robots.txt file. Alternatively, you can also specify the tag in the HTTP header.

As of this time, only Google supports the indexifembedded tag.

For more details and examples of this new tag, check out the Search Central Blog.