Let search engines crawl the homepage

Why it matters

robots.txt tells Googlebot or all crawlers not to fetch the homepage, so search engines cannot read it and will show little or nothing for it, although the address can still be listed without a description. This is often left over from a staging site.

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. Open https://example.com/robots.txt, find the Disallow rule that matches the homepage in the group for Googlebot or for all crawlers (Disallow with only a slash, for instance), and remove it or narrow it to the paths you really want to hide.
3. Check the result in the robots.txt report of Google Search Console, then use URL Inspection on the homepage and request indexing.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/

# Keep the next line only if the sitemap exists at this address
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

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
• Remove the noindex header from 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