Remove the nofollow instruction from the homepage

Why it matters

A robots meta tag with nofollow tells search engines not to follow the links on the homepage, so they find the rest of the site less easily. It is often a leftover from a staging site.

Staged change. Do this in stages and check each one before the next, so a mistake does not break your site or your mail.

The fix

1. First check that it is not deliberate. If you really do not want crawlers to follow any link on the page, leave it.
2. Remove nofollow from the robots meta tag, or delete the tag, and check the page source (and the X-Robots-Tag header) to confirm.

<!-- before -->
<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow">
<!-- after (or simply delete the tag; indexing and following are the default) -->
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

Read the documentation ↗(opens in a new tab)

Related

• Reported by the Indexability check
• Remove the noindex tag from the homepage
• Remove the noindex header from the homepage
• Let search engines crawl the homepage
• Resolve the noindex that robots.txt hides
• Find out why Google cannot index the homepage
• Fix the error status on the homepage
• Add structured data to the homepage
• Fix the broken structured data on the homepage