Resolve the noindex that robots.txt hides

Why it matters

The homepage has a noindex instruction, but robots.txt blocks crawlers from reading the page, so they never see it. Search engines can still list the address, without a description.

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. Decide what you want. If the homepage should appear in search, remove both the noindex and the robots.txt Disallow rule that blocks it.
2. If it should stay out of search, remove the robots.txt block so crawlers can read the noindex, and keep the noindex in place. Once the page has dropped out of results you can block it again if you want, but never rely on robots.txt alone to hide a page.
3. If the page must be private, protect it with a password or other access control instead of either method.

<!-- To stay out of search: crawlers must be allowed to read this -->
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

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
• Let search engines crawl the homepage
• 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