"Discourage Search Engines from Indexing This Site": What It Does and How to Recover

What the setting does today

The box sets the blog_public option to 0. Since WordPress 5.3 (November 2019), WordPress then prints this on every page (make.wordpress.org, September 2, 2019):

<meta name='robots' content='noindex, nofollow' />

Since WordPress 5.7 the tag comes from the wp_robots system through wp_robots_no_robots() (developer.wordpress.org). Older versions added Disallow: / to robots.txt instead; that is gone. So if your robots.txt looks fine but Google says "noindex", this box is the first suspect. Our WordPress robots.txt guide covers the file itself.

Google obeys the tag: a page with noindex is dropped from results the next time Google crawls it (Google Search Central, Block indexing with noindex).

How it gets turned on by accident

• Launch day. The site was built with the box ticked and nobody unticked it at launch.
• Staging pushed to live. Many staging copies are created with the box ticked. Pushing staging over production can copy that setting too.
• Migrations. Migration and clone plugins move the whole database, blog_public included.
• Coming-soon modes. WooCommerce's coming-soon setting and some hosts' "coming soon" modes hide the site in their own way. Check them after launch too.
• A teammate testing something. One click in Settings > Reading, then forgotten.

Fix it in 3 steps

1. Untick the box. Settings > Reading > Search engine visibility. Save. If the box is greyed out or keeps coming back, check your host's dashboard and any staging or maintenance plugin.
2. Check the live page. Open your homepage in a private window, view the source and search for noindex. If a noindex tag is still there, clear your page cache and CDN cache. If it still shows, your SEO plugin or a page builder is adding it: check the page's own robots setting.
3. Tell Google. In Search Console, use URL Inspection on the homepage and your 10 most important pages, click "Test live URL", then "Request indexing". Resubmit your sitemap in Indexing > Sitemaps.

How long recovery takes

Google has to recrawl each page before it can index it again. Google says crawling can take from a few days to a few weeks (Google, Ask Google to recrawl your URLs, updated December 10, 2025).

Watch Indexing > Pages. The "Excluded by 'noindex' tag" count should fall and "Indexed" should rise. When the count stops falling, click Validate fix on that reason. A site that was hidden for many months can take longer, because Google crawls it less often in the meantime.

Staging sites: keep them out of Google the right way

The box is a request, not a lock. Any site anyone can open can still be found and linked. For a staging copy, do this instead:

1. Password-protect it (HTTP authentication from your host, or a login wall). Google's advice for private content is to require a login (Google, Control what you share).
2. Also tick the box on staging, as a second layer.
3. Never copy the staging database over live without re-checking Settings > Reading right after.