Jan 27, 20222 min read

Google Rolls Out A New Robot Tag

As you might know, every time you post something on your website and Google discovers it, its robots start going through your content and compiling data. It’s trying to figure out what the page is about by analyzing the content, images and videos, so it would know how to rank your page on Google search when someone enters a specific query. This process is also known as indexing. You can turn the indexing off by using a noindex tag, but in general, indexing benefits you.

Now, Google is rolling out something that will give your site even more control over the content that gets indexed. A new robots tag, called indexifembedded, will let your website give more direction on which content to index in search results. As the name suggests, you can decide and tell Google to index a page if it’s embedded through iframes and specific HTML tags in other pages – even if the content page has a noindex tag, reports Search Engine Journal.

Google knows that certain media publishers want their content to be indexed when it’s embedded on third-party pages, but since they don’t want their media pages to be indexed on their own, they choose to use the noindex tag which prevents embedding the content in other pages. With this new robot, they can target the specific piece of content and index only that, without indexing the media too.

“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” – explained Google.

The new tag can be used together with the noindex tag since it can override it when the URL with it is embedded into another page.

How To Turn This On?

If you want to let your content be indexed when it’s embedded on other pages, you have to add the tag in combination with the noindex tag. Here’s the example Google provided us with: