Your homepage asks to stay out of search
In the reportHomepage noindex
homepage_noindex · Issue
This appears when your homepage carries a noindex directive that applies to Google, in a meta tag or an HTTP header. Google drops a page with noindex from its results, and the homepage is usually the page people search for first. Remove the directive unless the site is meant to stay out of search.
Severity: Critical. Fix it first: if Googlebot can reach your homepage and sees this noindex, Google drops it from its results.
Why it matters
When Google crawls a page and finds noindex in a meta tag or an HTTP header, it drops that page from its results, even if other sites link to it.
What to do
- Look at the finding: it shows the directive and whether it came from the page or its header.
- Remove it, often a setting in your website editor or SEO plugin that asks search engines not to index the site.
- Run a new audit once the change is live.
When to leave it as it is: if the site is not meant to be in search yet, such as a staging copy or a site before launch, leave it and remove it at launch.
What we read
The homepage is the page our crawl starts from, your site's address, or the page it redirects to on your site. We read it when it answers 200 with HTML, without running JavaScript.
It is reported when a <meta name="robots"> or <meta name="googlebot"> tag contains noindex or none, or an X-Robots-Tag header does so for all crawlers or for Googlebot. Directives scoped to other crawlers do not count: in one X-Robots-Tag field such as bingbot: nofollow, noindex, both directives stay scoped to Bingbot. Separate physical header fields are read independently. A homepage blocked by robots.txt, or one that is only a frame for scripts without a noindex, cannot be checked.
Example & evidence
Illustrative example — one homepage, not a live audit.
https://bakery.example/ answers 200 with this in its head:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">The homepage asks to stay out of search, so the site is reported with the tag. An X-Robots-Tag: noindex header would be reported the same way.
A possible correction: remove the tag, or use content="index, follow", with no noindex header.
Confirm & check again
Check for yourself: view your homepage's source and search for noindex, look for X-Robots-Tag in its response headers, and use Search Console's URL Inspection to see whether Google can index it.
Check again: Full audit — run a new audit of the site. The finding is confirmed fixed only when the homepage is read as a complete 200 HTML page, not only a frame for scripts, with no noindex that applies to Google, and the audit is complete: not cut short by its page limit, with every address it found fetched and answered 200, and none refused by robots.txt.
Limits & sources
The check reads the HTML as served, so a noindex added or removed by JavaScript is not seen. It does not show whether Google has already dropped the homepage.
Confidence: High because the directive is read directly from the homepage or its header.
Sources
- Google, Block Search indexing with noindex — describes noindex in a meta tag or an HTTP header, and that Google drops a page that carries it from its results. Checked 25 September 2026.
Editorial review: 29 September 2026