Is your website set to noindex? A 60-second check
A single tag can tell Google to leave your entire website out of its results. It is usually left behind by whoever built or rebuilt the site, nobody notices, and the company quietly disappears from the search a buyer runs before they call. Here is how to check in a minute, and how to fix it.
What the tag does
Google's documentation is plain about it. When Googlebot finds a noindex rule on a page, in a meta tag or an HTTP header, Google "will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it".1 The two methods have the same effect, and the header version also applies to files that are not web pages, such as PDFs.
The tag is useful on purpose: on a staging copy of a site, a thank-you page, or a private area. The damage happens when it is set on the whole site during a rebuild and never removed. In our October 2026 review of Pennsylvania contractors, two firms with substantial public award records had every page of a recently rebuilt site tagged noindex. Both were invisible to a search for their own name.
Check one: the search
In Google, type site:yourcompany.com with your own domain. If the result is a message that your search did not match any documents, or a single page where you expected ten, keep going. If your pages appear, the whole site is not blocked, but a single important page still might be, so run check two on your home page and your projects page.
Check two: the page source
Open your home page in a desktop browser. Right-click and choose View Page Source (or press Ctrl+U on Windows, Cmd+Option+U on a Mac). Press Ctrl+F or Cmd+F and search for noindex. If you find a line like <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> near the top, that page is tagged. Repeat on two or three other pages; the rebuild case usually tags all of them.
Check three: the header
The tag can also be sent as an HTTP header named X-Robots-Tag, which never appears in the page source. In the same browser, open the developer tools (F12, or Cmd+Option+I on a Mac), choose the Network tab, reload the page, click the first entry, and read the response headers for X-Robots-Tag. If that is more than you want to do, any free "HTTP header checker" site will show the same headers when you paste your address in.
One more thing to rule out
Google has to be able to read the page to see the rule. If your robots.txt file blocks Googlebot from the page, Google never sees the noindex tag at all, and the page can linger in results or vanish for a different reason.1 Open yourcompany.com/robots.txt and look for a Disallow: / line under User-agent: *. That blocks everything.
How to fix it
- WordPress. Settings, then Reading, then the box labeled "Discourage search engines from indexing this site". Uncheck it and save. SEO plugins such as Yoast or Rank Math have their own per-page and site-wide noindex settings; check those too.
- Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy and similar builders. Each has a site-wide "hide from search engines" switch in its SEO or privacy settings, and a per-page one in each page's settings. Turn both off.
- A custom site. Ask whoever built it to remove the meta tag from the template and the header from the server configuration, and to confirm by running check two and check three.
After the fix, the page does not reappear at once. Google has to recrawl it, and its own guidance says that can take time depending on how important the page is. You can speed it up: in Google Search Console, paste the page address into the URL inspection bar and request indexing.1 Do that for the home page and your two or three most important pages. The rest follow.
Why it is worth a minute
The people who choose contractors run your name before they call: the architect who received the plan-holder list, the business manager filling in the responsible-contractor form, the contracting officer doing market research. A noindex tag means that search shows a review site, a data broker and your competitors, and not you. It is the cheapest problem on a contractor's website to fix and the most expensive one to leave.
If you ran the checks and are not sure what you found, send us the address. We will tell you, with no obligation.
Sources
- Google Search Central, "Block Search indexing with noindex", developers.google.com.
The WordPress setting name is as shown in the WordPress Settings, Reading screen. Builder settings names vary by product and version; the descriptions above are general.