Google releases new robots tag to help indexing

Jonathon Roberts

Google has announced a new robots tag enabling users to have more control over what content gets indexed by the search engine.

What is a robots tag?

A robots tag is a piece of short code you can add to your site to tell search engines if you want a piece of content to be indexed within Google’s search results. This gives you more control over the content indexed in search.

Website plugins like Yoast SEO for WordPress and Shopify allow you to easily set content to be indexed or not indexed under the ‘Advanced’ section. If you set the content to be not indexed by search engines, a robots tag is added to the code of your website to tell search engines this.

The robots tag to no-index (stop search engines from listing that content in search results) is:

A new code has been added by Google called indexifembedded, which lets you tell Google to only index content on a page if it is embedded through iFrames and similar HTML tags.

What are iFrames?

iFrames allow you to embed content into your pages on your website; for example, if you embed a YouTube video into your website’s content, this is an iFrame.

Why did Google release this new robots tag?

Google says it created the tag to fix an issue that has been affecting media publishers for a while now, explaining:

“… 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.”

Currently, Google is the only search engine that considers this new robots tag, so it will be interesting to look out to see if other search engines adopt this in the future.

If you would like to find out how we can help improve your business’s online presence through creating an effective digital marketing strategy, contact our friendly team to find out more.

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Jonathon Roberts

Jonathon lives and breathes marketing, boasting a degree in Business Management and Marketing Management and a diverse list of experiences both professional and voluntary. Having grown up in the thick of the digital and social media age, he has been quick to dive into online marketing and search engine optimisation in his career and spare time, spanning such fields as academics, local business and sport.

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