What does noindex mean, and why isn’t my site showing up on Google?
Noindex is an instruction on a page that tells search engines not to list it. It’s useful on a staging site or a thank-you page. On your homepage it means Google has been told, politely, to leave you out. It’s the first thing to check when a site that used to appear in search suddenly doesn’t.
How the check knows
It looks for a robots tag in the page and for the equivalent header sent by the server. It also checks the basics every page should have: a title, a description, a declared language, a viewport line so phones lay the page out properly, and a description on each image for people who can’t see it and for search engines, which can’t either.
Why it happens
The commonest cause by far is a WordPress setting. Under Settings, then Reading, there’s a box labelled “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. Developers tick it while a site is being built so the half-finished version doesn’t get indexed, and sometimes nobody unticks it at launch. The site works perfectly and Google ignores it for months. Some SEO plugins and some hosts add the same instruction in other ways.
What the basics mean
The title is what appears as the blue link in search results and in the browser tab. The description is the grey text under it; without one, Google writes its own, badly. The language tells browsers and search engines who the page is for. The viewport line is what makes a page readable on a phone. Image descriptions are what a screen reader says aloud and what a search engine sees instead of the picture.
What you can do yourself
Log in to WordPress, open Settings, then Reading, and make sure that box is unticked. Then open your homepage in a browser, view the page source, and search it for the word noindex. If it’s still there, a plugin or your host is adding it. For the basics, most WordPress sites let you set the title and description per page; the image descriptions are the “alt text” field in the media library.
When it’s a developer’s job
When you’ve unticked the box and the instruction is still there, when the site is on a host or platform you can’t get into, or when a site has been invisible for months and you want to know whether anything else is keeping it out. A free first look will tell you which.