Google Gives Sites More Indexing Control With New Robots Tag

indexing control with new robots tag
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Google is introducing a new robot element that allows webmasters more control over the material that appears in search results. Indexifembedded is a new robots tag that allows websites to offer Google more control over which material to analyze in search results.

One can ask Google only to index material on a webpage if it’s embedded using iframes and other HTML tags with this tag. The noindex tag is overridden by the indexifembedded tag

indexifembedded tag (Indexing Control With New Robots Tag)
indexifembedded tag (Indexing Control With New Robots Tag)

See Also: Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag specifications

That means you may use the noindex tag to keep an entire URL out of search engine results. And the indexifembedded feature to make a particular portion of material indexable when it’s integrated on another page.

According to Google, it invented this tag to address a problem that affects media publishers:

“…while they may want their material to be indexed when it’s embedded on other websites, they will not desire their multimedia web pages to be indexed on their own.”

When Should You Use Indexifembedded?

This additional robots tag isn’t applicable to many publications because it’s designed for material with a distinct URL for integrating purposes.

A podcast producer, for example, may have websites devoted to each audio episode, each with its own URL.

Then there’d be direct links to the multimedia, which other websites may utilize to embed the audio on their own pages.

A URL like this could be useful for referencing a podcast episode, as I did recently in a post about Googlebot crawling. It’s possible that the podcaster doesn’t want the multimedia URLs to appear in search results. A noindex tag was once the sole way of keeping them outside of Google Search.

robots tag (Indexing Control With New Robots Tag)
robots tag (Indexing Control With New Robots Tag)

The noindex element, on the other hand, prohibits the material from being embedded in other web pages during indexing. As a result, if the publisher intended to allow embedding, the media URL had to be indexed as well.

Publishers have far more flexibility over what has been indexed thanks to the indexifembedded tag.

When a URL containing noindex is integrated into another page using an iframe or equivalent HTML tag, the indexifembedded tag will overrule it.

What Is The Indexifembedded Tag And How Do I Use It?

This additional robots label can come into use are in two ways.

Also, using the indexifembedded feature in conjunction with the noindex tags is beneficial. It allows you to index the material to except when it’s integrated on other pages.

indexifembedded tag
indexifembedded tag

Only Google presently provides the indexifembedded label.

See Also: December 27 & 28 Google Search Ranking Algorithm Jolt?

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