Remove the noindex header from the homepage

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. 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 who sends the header. Run the command in the snippet, then search your server configuration, application code, hosting panel and CDN rules for X-Robots-Tag. Remove the line or change the rule, and reload the service.
3. Run the command again to confirm the header is gone, then use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console and request indexing.

curl -sI https://example.com/ | grep -i x-robots-tag

The examples use example.com. Replace it with your own domain.

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