“noindex, nofollow” doesn’t prevent Google from fetching or crawling a page. It is still there for all to see… including search engines. What it does do is signal to a search engine “don’t include this page in your index or follow links on this page”.
Just reread your post and realized I missed the point 😛
Check the source of the page and see if there is another plugin somewhere that might be adding a second noindex, nofollow… you might want to check your wordpress settings under “Privacy” to make sure your site isn’t set to be hidden from search.
H,
Thanks for replying.
Nope. No other SEO plugin installed, page source doesn’t show noindex, nofollow.
Privacy can’t be an issue as it is indexing all internal posts. It’s just the homepage that is deindexed 🙁
When I fetch as web in Google webmaster tools, it shows noindex,nofollow right at the top before <!DOCTYPE html>, it shows the following:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: ApacheBooster/1.3
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2012 14:23:31 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow
X-Pingback: http://mydomain.com/xmlrpc.php
X-Cacheable: YES
Content-Encoding: gzip
X-Varnish: XXXXXXXXXXX
Via: 1.1 varnish
age: 0
X-Cache: MISS
Although below this in source code, it doesn’t show “noindex, nofollow” anywhere.
Any other suggestions?
That’s an X-Robots tag, which is typically sent via server HTTP headers. Its likely that its in your htaccess file, and not in a plugin.
