Can I add rel nofollow to iframe tag?

Question

I have a widget distributed in some sites via an iframe. But I don't want the google bot index the url. Will adding a nofollow to iframe tag resolve the problem?. Does Iframe tag support nofollow, and will Google understand it?

Answer 1

Absolutely, you kind of can add rel="nofollow" to an iframe. You just must be tricky about it. Here's how...

Build a blank html file. Add your iframe to that alone. In the Meta tag include

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

Now, iframe that page onto the one your going to show.

Answer 2

The rel attribute is not allowed for the iframe element.

See allowed attributes for iframe: HTML5, HTML 4.01

Answer 3

According to Google, all you need is

<meta name="robots" content="none" />

“none - Equivalent to noindex, nofollow”

Answer 4

It is not possible but there is a workaround for it. You can use a URL of your domain that redirects to the IFRAME. In your robots.txt, you will prevent the bots to follow the link of your URL.

In your robots.txt add

User-agent:*
Disallow:/h/

Then, create a 301 redirect in your htaccess or something similar if you use something else like nginx. that will redirect a local URL to the URL of the Iframe.

Redirect 301 /h/fancy-url/ http://targetdomain.com/the-uri-of-iframe/

In your iframe use the

<iframe src="https://yourdomain.com/h/fancy-url/?possibleparam=xx">

Answer 5

"rel" is not a recognised attribute for the "iframe" tag according to W3C specs. You could use some javascript and document.write to place the iframe code on the page

Answer 6

you might want to check out is IFrame crawled by Google? but from my understanding the "nofollow" is not allowed on an iframe