The Homepage Google Couldn’t See, and the Free Tool That Found Why
Jayen Ashar · 2 min read
A WordPress homepage had disappeared from Google for two to three months. Paid SEO tools hadn’t found the problem. Chrome’s free Lighthouse audit did: the homepage was serving a noindex tag.
The paid tools said nothing
The site was already being checked with paid SEO tooling, SiteBulb included. None of it surfaced the problem.
The free audit that did
Chrome has a built-in audit called Lighthouse. Run on the homepage, it gave an SEO score of 33, and it pointed straight at one line in the page:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
That tag tells search engines not to index the page. It was on the homepage only, which is part of why it was easy to miss.
Ruling things out
- WordPress’s own setting: the “Discourage search engines” box (Settings → Reading) was already unchecked. So it wasn’t WordPress core.
- The SEO plugin: the tag traced back to the plugin’s settings.
- Search Console: confirmed it. “URL is not on Google”, noindex tag detected, indexing not allowed.
The part that catches people out
Fixing the plugin setting wasn’t the end of it. The tag kept being served after the setting changed, because the old page was still sitting in cache. It only went away once both the WP Engine and Cloudflare caches were cleared.
If you fix it and nothing changes, check the caches before you check the fix.
What founders should take from this
- Run the free audit first. Lighthouse is in Chrome already. It looks at the actual page, which is where this problem lived.
- Check the page, not just the site setting. A site-wide “allow search engines” setting doesn’t stop a plugin adding noindex to a single page.
- Clear every cache layer after an SEO fix. Hosting cache and CDN cache both. Then confirm in Search Console that Google sees the change.
Two to three months out of Google, and the answer was one line in the page. The expensive tools weren’t looking there.
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