Google Introduces New robots meta tag: indexifembedded

[engine]

Google has introduced a new robots tag: indexifembedded

It says the tag allows webmasters more control over content embedded through iframes and similar HTML tags in other pages, even when the content page has the noindex tag.

The indexifembedded tag addresses a common issue that especially affects 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. Because they don't want the media pages indexed, they currently use a noindex tag in such pages. However, the noindex tag also prevents embedding the content in other pages during indexing.

[developers.google.com...]

[edited by: engine at 12:26 pm (utc) on Jan 26, 2022]

[robzilla]

It's a new robots tag, not a new robots.txt tag ;-) You can't use this in robots.txt.

[not2easy]

Thanks, that's right, robzilla. I've adjusted the title. It is for use in robots meta tag or X-Robots tags.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Or a new robots meta element attribute value to be pedantic another way!

[aristotle]

At one time Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo would work together on introducing new robots tags. Now Google apparently ignores the other search engines and acts alone.

[Dimitri]

I wish Google would come up with the opposite tag, "donotindexifembedded" to avoid sites which are hot linking images, to appear (in image search) above or instead the site from where the image originates from ...

[lucy24]

Seriously. Why on earth would I want my content indexed when someone else has embedded it, but not on its home turf?

[tangor]

@lucy24 ... the inverse is equally questioned! That would be a Perry Mason moment.

[ColinM]

> indexifembedded

My first thought when I saw this was 'has someone made covfefe?'

[eriky]

This could be exactly what I need. I created a code embedding service that works through iframes. So you can create a piece of code and embed that on your site (like GitHub gists but with mich more options). I don't want these embed pages indexed by themselves, but I want them to be indexed as part of the page that is embedding the code. Can anyone tell me if this following meta tag would mean that's going to work as I described it?

<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex,indexifembedded" />`

I currently use a link rel="canonical" link to a dedicated page on the same domain, and a javascript-based redirect if someone visits the embed URL while it's not actually embedded.