Indexifembedded, a new robots tag, allows websites to give Google more control over which content to index in search results.
This tag instructs Google to only index content on a page if it is embedded using iframes or similar HTML tags.
The indexifembedded tag takes precedence over the noindex tag.
That means you can use noindex to hide an entire URL from search results, and indexifembedded to make a specific piece of content indexable when it’s embedded on another webpage.
According to Google, this tag was created to address a problem affecting 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 To Use The Indexifembedded Tag
This new robots tag does not apply to many publishers because it is intended for content that has a separate URL for embedding purposes.
For example, a podcast publisher may have web pages dedicated to each podcast episode, each with its own URL.
Then there would be direct links to the media, which other sites could use to embed the podcast on one of their pages.
Such a URL could be used when referencing a podcast episode, as I recently did in an article about Googlebot crawling.
The podcast creator might not want the media URLs to appear in search results. Previously, the only way to prevent them from appearing in Google Search was to use a noindex tag.
The noindex tag, on the other hand, prevents the content from being embedded in other pages during indexing. As a result, if the publisher wanted to allow embedding, the media URL had to be indexed as well.
Publishers now have more control over what has indexed thanks to the indexifembedded tag.
The indexifembedded tag can be used in conjunction with the noindex tag, and it will override it if the URL with noindex is embedded into another page via an iframe or similar HTML tag.
Google offers the following example:
“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.”
Read Tag Pages & Content Tagging For SEO: A Complete Guide.
How To Use The Indexifembedded Tag
This new robots tag can be used in two ways.
Add the indexifembedded tag in conjunction with the noindex tag to allow your content to be indexed only when it is embedded on other pages.
In the image below, you can see an example of how the code would look:
You can also specify the tag in the HTTP header.
Take a look at the image below to see how that would look.
Only Google currently supports the indexifembedded tag.
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