Google’s John Mueller was asked about why a site saw a major dropping in image search traffic after embedding Instagram images on his site. John decided to test it and noticed that Instagram on the embeds use a no index robots meta tag, that tells Google that they don’t want those images indexed together with the page itself.

Meaning, if you use Instagram and use Instagram’s embed code, Google most likely will not rank the image on your site in image search. John said in that video hangout “But what really kind of breaks the story for us is that within the content that is embedded from from Instagram on with within the iframe. They use a no index robots meta tag. And this meta tag tells us that you don’t want those images indexed together with the page itself. So if we just look at that iframe content we can recognize that there’s an image, there we can crawl that image but with that meta tag you’re basically telling us that you don’t want this image index together with that landing page.”

This question came up at the 29:38 mark into the video:

Here is the transcript:

Glenn Gabe summed it up nicely on Twitter:

So I guess if you want to use the embed, and you also want the image indexed with the page, maybe include the image itself as well in your HTML?

Forum discussion at Twitter.