Remove the noindex tag from the homepage

Why it matters

A robots meta tag with noindex tells search engines to keep the homepage out of their results, so it will not appear when people search for you. It is often a leftover from a staging site or a launch.

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 (a private, staging or not yet launched site). If it is deliberate, leave it and ignore this finding.
2. Find where the tag comes from. Search the page source for noindex, then look at your CMS, SEO plugin, theme templates and a staging or maintenance mode setting. Remove the tag or change the setting, and save.
3. Reload the homepage source to confirm the tag is gone, then use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console and request indexing. It can take days or weeks for the page to come back.

<!-- remove this line, or any robots or googlebot meta tag that contains noindex -->
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

Read the documentation ↗(opens in a new tab)

Related

• Reported by the Indexability check
• 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
• Remove the nofollow instruction from the homepage
• Add structured data to the homepage
• Fix the broken structured data on the homepage