Only home page is not indexed by search engines

Many bloggers post in many forums that their website’s index page or the home page is not indexed or their homepage doesn’t show when using the site: operator in Google or their home page is not showing up in search engine result pages etc.., Even if people dig deep in internet for a solution for this problem, they do not find a simple and proper solution and end up messing their crucial home page which is usually the landing page for most of the sites. Here in this article I assure you that you will find out why your home page is not indexed by Google or Bing or any search engine out there and how to get it indexed.

Meta tag in the home page:

Open your home page in the browser and right click on it and then click on  “view page source”. If you find the following code in that source page ,it means that you are telling the search engine not to index your home page and never your home page would be indexed.

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

If your website is powered by wordpress then it is obvious that the culprit is some plugin which is embedding this meta tag in your pages including the home page. Try disabling each plugin and then check the source again,magically you will find that the above tag disappears on disabling a plugin. After making sure that the above tag is not present, submit your home page again for indexing using the webmaster tools.

Problem with Robots.txt:

This text file which would be present in the root folder of every website could also cause problems and might be responsible for your home page not being indexed.This text file has many instructions for the web crawlers of the search engines related to indexing.If your Robots.txt file has the following code in it then it forces the search engine not to index any of your content.

                                                        User-agent: * Disallow: /

It could be problem with the sitemap if the home page is not indexed

Your XML sitemap generating plugin might have failed to work and might be providing broken or incorrect sitemap to the search engine. Make sure that there is no issue with your sitemap and then visit the webmaster tools and re-submit your fresh sitemap.

If you are running a wordpress driven website and you are using the popular Yoast WordPress SEO plugin ,see that the check box saying “Noindex for pages” is not checked. Also go through the Settings > Reading Settings in the dashboard and see that the check box saying “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is not checked.

Multiple home page URLs :

In many cases it is easier to point links to the domain name www.example.com/ and not www.example.com/index.html. So consider setting up a redirect from www.example.com/index.html to www.example.com/ Also make sure that you do not have URL format issues.

Other issues:

Your website might not have enough page rank or you just provide scraped content and the website is a thin affiliate website or some problem with the .htaccess file or presence of a tag rel=”canonical” which redirects to some other link or website.