The only thing the “discourage search engines from indexing” checkbox did was add a noindex tag to the header of your WordPress site. If you’re not using WordPress anymore that tag isn’t there anymore and it cannot have any effect. Any solution to the issue you’re experiencing now will not involve WordPress, so there’s not … Read more
Found the solution myself: Settings -> Reading -> Discourage search engines from indexing this site (must be blank)(bottom of page)
Try an SEO or meta tag plugin that will give you the most options to work with meta for the home page, for post pages, static pages, etc. It’s not enough to simply add one metatag to the header template. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=SEO&sort=
Yoast SEO is set up to do this for you on a per-page basis. If you aren’t using Yoast already, I’d strongly recommend it – there are advanced controls for SEO, indexing, redirecting, etc.
The setting is stored in the option blog_public. if( 0 == get_option( ‘blog_public’ ) ){ echo ‘search engines discouraged’; }