As can be safely inferred from the question, I'm trying to get Google to index my site.
I'm using Wordpress 5.9 served by nginx (1.13.12), with SEOPress (5.6 up-to-date).
I let the wizard guide me for the settings and created a sitemap that I registered with Google Search Console - as advised.
I let Google do its work and came back later to check, and found that every page exposed in my sitemap returns a noindex
meta (X-Robots-Tag with User-Agent 'Googlebot for smartphones').
I did uncheck the "discourage search engines..." checkbox in Wordpress Reading settings.
I also did reset opcache, and I don't have a wp cache plugin (I don't have that much traffic so far).
And when I load the pages in a browser or with curl
the X-Robots-Tag is set to none...
$ curl -I https://www.alchimie-web.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.13.12
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2022 15:07:44 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: keep-alive
X-Powered-By: PHP/7.3.16
Set-Cookie: __wpdm_client=ce7f05b428fa7da70dc3dd9192fdc0a5; secure; HttpOnly
Link: <https://www.alchimie-web.com/wp-json/>; rel="https://api.w.org/"
Link: <https://www.alchimie-web.com/wp-json/wp/v2/pages/7>; rel="alternate"; type="application/json"
Link: <https://www.alchimie-web.com/>; rel=shortlink
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
X-Robots-Tag: none
X-Download-Options: noopen
X-Permitted-Cross-Domain-Policies: none
even with various User-Agents to try and reproduce what the Googlebot reads :
$ curl -A 'Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)' -I https://www.alchimie-web.com
or
curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)' -I https://www.alchimie-web.com
or
curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.93 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)' -I https://www.alchimie-web.com
The site never returns a X-Robots-Tag: noindex
...
Any hint on what I'm doing wrong ?
Should I use another SEO plugin ? (though I read that the same problem sometimes occurs with Yoast...)