noindex on public page

What this means

noindex tells search engines not to include a page in their index. On staging this is intentional. On your production homepage it is a critical problem: the page cannot rank for anything. The check looks for noindex in both the <meta name="robots"> tag and the X-Robots-Tag HTTP response header.

The most common cause is a staging-environment robots directive that was accidentally deployed to production.

How to fix it

Find where noindex is being set and remove it.

Next.js App Router

Search app/layout.tsx and any page.tsx files for a robots metadata field:

// app/layout.tsx — remove noindex or set explicitly to index
export const metadata = {
  robots: {
    index: true,
    follow: true,
  },
}

If environment-based logic is setting noindex in staging and index in production, confirm the production environment variable is set correctly.

Next.js Pages Router

Search for noindex in any <Head> components across your pages and _app.tsx:

// Remove this from any page or _app.tsx
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

SvelteKit

Search all +layout.svelte and +page.svelte files:

<!-- Remove this from any layout or page -->
<svelte:head>
  <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
</svelte:head>

Nuxt

Check app.vue, layouts, and any page that calls useSeoMeta or useHead:

// Remove or correct this
useSeoMeta({ robots: 'noindex' })

// Change to:
useSeoMeta({ robots: 'index, follow' })

Astro

Check your base layout for a robots meta tag:

<!-- Remove this from Layout.astro or any page -->
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

X-Robots-Tag header

If noindex is coming from an HTTP header rather than a meta tag, check your server or middleware config. In Next.js, check next.config.js for a custom headers configuration:

// next.config.js — remove any noindex from the headers array
module.exports = {
  async headers() {
    return [
      {
        source: '/(.*)',
        headers: [
          // Remove this line:
          { key: 'X-Robots-Tag', value: 'noindex' },
        ],
      },
    ]
  },
}

Verify the fix

Check the response for any noindex directive:

# Check meta tag
curl -s https://yourdomain.com/ | grep -i 'robots'

# Check response header
curl -I https://yourdomain.com/ | grep -i 'x-robots'

Neither output should contain noindex. Re-run orino audit to confirm the check passes.