One SEO professional asked John Mueller in a hangout about whether they can block embedded video pages or not.
Their question was: They are in charge of a video replay platform, and their embeds are indexed individually.
How can they prevent their embeds from being indexed in this fashion?
John explained that he looked at their website, and these embeds are iframes that include a simplified HTML page with a video player embedded in that.
From a technical point of view, if a page has iframe content, then they see those two HTML pages. And it’s possible that their systems index both of those HTML pages because they are separate HTML pages.
One is included in the other usually, but they could theoretically stand on their own as well. And there’s one way to prevent that, which is a fairly new combination, with robots meta tags.
You can use the indexifembedded robots meta tag, together with a noindex robots meta tag. So the HTML file with the video directly in it, you would add the combination of noindex plus indexifembedded robots meta tags.
That would mean that if Google finds a page individually, they will see “oh, there’s noindex, they don’t have to index this.” But with the index embedded, it tells Google that, actually, if they find this page with the video embedded within the general website, then they can index that video content. This means that the individual HTML page would not be indexed, but the HTML page with the embed with the video information, this is what would be indexed normally.
So that’s the setup that John recommends using there.
This is a fairly new robots meta tag, so it’s not something that everyone really needs. This combination of iframe content or embedded content is actually pretty rare.
For some sites, however, it just makes sense to do it this way.
This happens at approximately the 19:00 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Question)
Okay, a little bit more technical question, I guess: I’m in charge of a video replay platform, and simplified, our embeds are sometimes indexed individually. How can we prevent that?
John (Answer)
So by embeds, I looked at the website. And basically, these are iframes that include kind of a simplified HTML page with a video player embedded in that. And from a technical point of view, if a page has iframe content, then we see those two HTML pages. And it is possible that our systems index both of those HTML pages, because they are separate HTML pages. One is included in the other usually, but they could theoretically kind of stand on their own as well.
And there’s one way to prevent that, which is a fairly new combination with robots meta tags that you can do, which is with the indexifembedded robots meta tag, together with a noindex robots meta a tag. And basically on the embedded version, so the HTML file with the video directly in it, you would add the combination of noindex plus indexifembedded robots meta tags. And that would mean that if we find a page individually, we will see oh, there’s a noindex, we don’t have to index this.
But with the indexifembedded, it essentially tells us that well, actually, if we find this page with the video embedded within kind of the general website, then we can index that that video content. Which means that the individual HTML page would not be indexed, but the HTML page with the embed with the video information, that would be indexed normally. So that’s kind of the setup that I would use there. And this is a fairly new robots meta tag. So it’s, it’s something that not everyone really needs. Because this combination of iframe content or embedded content is kind of rare. But for some sites, it just makes sense to do it like that.
