Google is introducing a new robots tag, indexifembedded, that brings you more control over when your content is indexed. With the indexifembedded tag, you can tell Google you’d still like your content indexed when it’s 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.
The new robots tag, indexifembedded, works in combination with the noindex tag only when the page with noindex is embedded into another page through an iframe or similar HTML tag, like object. For example, if podcast.host.example/playpage?podcast=54321 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.
To enable your content to be indexed only when it’s embedded on other pages, make sure to add indexifembedded in combination with the noindex tag. For example:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex" />
<meta name="googlebot" content="indexifembedded" />
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex,indexifembedded" />
Alternatively, you can specify the tag in the HTTP header:
X-Robots-Tag: googlebot:noindex
X-Robots-Tag: googlebot:indexifembedded
X-Robots-Tag: googlebot:noindex,indexifembedded
Presently, only Google supports the indexifembedded tag.