Last Updated on April 13, 2023
Google has introduced a new robots tag, indexifembedded, to give more control to publishers over their content.
The Problem that Existed
As a media publisher if you have been embedding content in third-party pages, and those pages are tagged as noindex then your embedded content is also ignored by Google bots. This was a major obstacle for media publishers who do not want the media pages to be indexed on their own, so they add noindex tag to the pages, but this prevents embedding the content in other pages during indexing.
For instance, if you embed Instagram or Facebook images in a web page, you might have at times got a Google warning stating the SEO issues it might cause. This is because when you try to embed a piece of content, say using an iframe or some other code embed method and if the content has a directive in the header to be noindexed, it will tell Google that since the embedded content is noindex, do not index the content around that embed on the page.
The Solution
With the indexifembedded tag, the search giant is giving you more control over how to manage the pages with embedded content. By using indexifembedded tag on a page, you essentially tell Google to index the page irrespective of what directives are used for the embedded content.
Google on its developer blog, introduced the new robots tag stating, “it 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.”
How to use the indexifembedded robots tag?
According to official Google statement the new tag “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.”
Let’s understand this with an example. Suppose we have a page https://www.seoeaze.com/blog/noindex-post-example, that is set to noindex and we embed the content from this page on a new post, say, https://www.seoeaze.com/blog/new-post.
Now, not only the embedded content will not be indexed by Google, but it can also render https://www.seoeaze.com/blog/new-post page noindex due to SEO issues.
The solution is to use both ‘noindex’ and ‘indexifembedded’ tags to the https://www.seoeaze.com/blog/noindex-post-example.
Now, when we embed the content from this page on another page, Google will know that the embedded content is to be indexed, even when it is from a page that is set to ‘noindex’.
Neat, isn’t it!
Here’s a code snippet shared by Google to add indexifembedded in combination with the noindex tag.
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex" /> <meta name="googlebot" content="indexifembedded" />
You can also combine both tags together:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex,indexifembedded" />
And if you want to specify it in the HTTP header, here’s how you can do it:
X-Robots-Tag: googlebot:noindex X-Robots-Tag: googlebot:indexifembedded ...
OR
…
X-Robots-Tag: googlebot:noindex,indexifembedded
What all search engines support the indexifembedded tag?
At, present only Google supports the indexifembedded tag, but we assume soon other search engines will join in. First, there is a huge advantage of this tag for media publishers, second, it prevents the SEO issues that pages with embedded content faced previously.
And, if you want to keep in the loop with the latest development about this new robots tag, you can join the Twitter conversation here.
