Remove the noindex header from the homepage on nginx

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 find the directive with the command in the snippet and remove or comment it out. Also check the application behind nginx.
2. If the header comes from an application behind nginx, either fix it in the application or add proxy_hide_header X-Robots-Tag; to the location that proxies it (use fastcgi_hide_header X-Robots-Tag; for PHP-FPM).
3. Run nginx -t, reload nginx, and run curl -sI on the homepage to check the header is gone.

grep -rn "X-Robots-Tag" /etc/nginx/

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