Remove the noindex tag from the homepage on WordPress
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
- Check that it is not deliberate, then open Settings, Reading and clear Discourage search engines from indexing this site. WordPress adds noindex to every page while it is ticked.
- If the setting is clear, check your SEO plugin (the homepage or the page's own Advanced settings, and Search appearance settings), maintenance or coming-soon plugins, and your host's staging mode. Clear caches afterwards.
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
Scan your domain to see whether this applies to you.