Google adds a new tag robots for embedded content
A few days ago there was a new meta tag robots in the list of those known and used: a little surprisingly, in fact, Google officially announced the introduction of indexifembedded, a new command with which sites can communicate information about their content, especially for embedded ones, and have more control over their indexing.
What is indexifembedded, Google’s new robots tag
As the post posted on Search Central explains, the indexifembedded tag tells Google “that you still want content to be indexed when it is embedded via iframes and similar HTML tags on other pages, even when the content page has the noindex tag“.
What is the command for
According to Google, the new tag solves a common problem that affects in particular publishers of multimedia content, which “when they allow embedding of content do not always want the content of the page to be indexed”and indexifembedded just ensures it offers more control over the communication of such wishes to Google Search.
As we read in the article, sometimes publishers “may want their content to be indexed when it is embedded in third-party pages, but they don’t necessarily want their multimedia pages to be indexed by themselves.” and then set a noindex tag in those pages, which however “also prevents you from embedding content in other pages during indexing”.
How indexifembedded works with noindex
Now, instead, you can use the new indexifembedded tag along with the original noindex tag if “the page with noindex is embedded in another page via an iframe or similar HTML tag as an object” and thus allow Google to incorporate the hosted content on that page during indexing.
For example, continues the article, if the page podcast.host.example/playpage? podcast=12345 has both noindex and indexifembedded tag means that “Google can embed content hosted on the other page in recipe.site.example/my-recipes.html when indexing”.
To correctly implement the function we have two alternatives, the normal meta robots tag and the alternative HTTP X-Robots-Tag headers. In particular, the code to be entered in the first case is
<meta name=”googlebot” value=”noindex” />
<meta name=”googlebot” value=”indexifembedded” />
or
<meta name=”googlebot” value=”noindex,indexifembedded” />.
If we prefer to specify the tag in the HTTP header, instead, we must use these commands:
X-Robots-Tag: googlebot:noindex
X-Robots-Tag: googlebot:indexifembedded
…
or
…
X-Robots-Tag: googlebot:noindex,indexifembedded
Cases of use of indexifembedded
Currently the indexifembedded tag is only supported on the Google search engine and, beyond curiosity, its functionality seems to be rather limited.
The command, in fact, is designed for content publishers who do not want their pages to be indexed by Googlebot, but at the same time have no problem if their contents are indexed when embedded in websites or external pages via iframe.
A situation that does not appear frequently and that can be useful in the case of widgets or video embed that you want to allow indexing others, or that can serve in the management of resources such as PDF embedded in web pages (blocking with noindex the original PDF, but allowing the HTML page that incorporated it to benefit from the content of the PDF document).
