I want google to index my index page, but do not index any other pages.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
So far I have this. However...when I do this, Google does not index my index page. When I search my name in Google, all it shows is "www.mydomain.com" as the first result with no description.
Instead, I want Google to index my main index page, WITH the meta description tag, too.
For Google, in particular, the following rules will do the trick:
User-Agent: *
Allow: /$
Disallow: /
For details, see Google's documentation of their supported robots.txt syntax. However, note that the middle line is non-standard for two reasons: first, it's an Allow directive (the basic robots.txt standard only supports Disallow) and second, it uses the non-standard end-of-URL anchor $. That said, several other major search engines, including Bing, do support more or less the same syntax.
Google and other search engines support the Allow: statement now in addition to Disallow:... though they may behave differently on different search engine spiders, and may not be supported or enforced by other types of site scrapers.
Documentation here
Why would you want to disallow Google your pages?
Anyway yo do this you could do:
Disallow: /
Allow: /index.html
I use like this:
User-agent: Yandex
Allow: /index.html
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /index.html
Disallow: /
