A friend pointed out to me that a website is not in Google because of the presence of a
<meta name='robots' content='noindex,follow' />
tag in the home page. Ok, should be easy enough to turn that off, right?
Wrong.
Site uses Genesis framework, and in the SEO settings, none of the options are enabled to generate noindex.
Go to the individual page (homepage is a page, not a post), look there, none of the noindex options are checked there either.
Ok, one thing I do see, something is generating a robots.txt with disallow all. Not sure what is doing that, but it's not helping, so I upload a new robots.txt and remove write perms and now I can see my new robots.txt is remaining in effect that allows spiders.
Still getting that tag in the header though.
Then I think, has to be the coming soon plugin, (Soon) just being wonky, so disable that completely, still have the noindex tag.
(Then I remember I've never cleared the wp cache on any of these attempts, so do that....)
Then I find this Remove meta robots tag from wp_head
and realize wait, what? There's a blog_public wp_option?
Install phpMyAdmin so I can look, sure enough, blog_public = 0. EUREKA?
Set that to 1, reload in Firefox and Chrome, the noindex tag is gone (victory?)
Head over to Google webmaster tools, tell it to reindex and it's still complaining it won't because there's a robots tag with noindex
W-T-actual-F
In a shell, now...
lynx -source -dump
<html lang="en-US">
<head itemscope itemtype="">
<meta charset="UTF-8" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
**<meta name='robots' content='noindex,follow' />**
Where on earth it that coming from? Considering I can still reload the page in FF or Chrome and that tag doesn't show up?
A friend pointed out to me that a website is not in Google because of the presence of a
<meta name='robots' content='noindex,follow' />
tag in the home page. Ok, should be easy enough to turn that off, right?
Wrong.
Site uses Genesis framework, and in the SEO settings, none of the options are enabled to generate noindex.
Go to the individual page (homepage is a page, not a post), look there, none of the noindex options are checked there either.
Ok, one thing I do see, something is generating a robots.txt with disallow all. Not sure what is doing that, but it's not helping, so I upload a new robots.txt and remove write perms and now I can see my new robots.txt is remaining in effect that allows spiders.
Still getting that tag in the header though.
Then I think, has to be the coming soon plugin, (Soon) just being wonky, so disable that completely, still have the noindex tag.
(Then I remember I've never cleared the wp cache on any of these attempts, so do that....)
Then I find this Remove meta robots tag from wp_head
and realize wait, what? There's a blog_public wp_option?
Install phpMyAdmin so I can look, sure enough, blog_public = 0. EUREKA?
Set that to 1, reload in Firefox and Chrome, the noindex tag is gone (victory?)
Head over to Google webmaster tools, tell it to reindex and it's still complaining it won't because there's a robots tag with noindex
W-T-actual-F
In a shell, now...
lynx -source -dump https://mysite.example
<html lang="en-US">
<head itemscope itemtype="https://schema/WebSite">
<meta charset="UTF-8" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
**<meta name='robots' content='noindex,follow' />**
Where on earth it that coming from? Considering I can still reload the page in FF or Chrome and that tag doesn't show up?
Share Improve this question asked Jan 27, 2019 at 0:26 Pointy Haired BossPointy Haired Boss 11 Answer
Reset to default 0I was editing stuff in default-filters.php and then cleared my wp cache and it finally went away. Then I undid my change to default-filters.php and it stayed away.
So I'm inclined to think, this was a caching issue?