Remove the noindex header from the homepage on Caddy

Why it matters

An X-Robots-Tag header with noindex tells search engines to keep the homepage out of their results, even though the page itself looks fine. It is often a leftover from a staging server or a security rule.

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. Check that it is not deliberate, then remove the header line in the Caddyfile that sets X-Robots-Tag (search the file for it) and any header set by the application behind Caddy.
2. If the header comes from an application behind reverse_proxy, either fix it in the application or strip it from the proxied response with header_down, as in the snippet.
3. Run caddy reload and run curl -sI on the homepage to check the header is gone.

reverse_proxy localhost:8080 {
	header_down -X-Robots-Tag
}

Read the documentation ↗(opens in a new tab)

Related

• Reported by the Indexability check
• Remove the noindex tag 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