Has anyone had experience with the Wix platform and it's SEO qualities?

[ksracer]

Wix offers an inexpensive, user friendly platform for building websites. Most of the site is flash, but Wix claims to be SEO friendly. I'm all ears for your feedback and experience with Wix.

[Raydon]

That is GREAT news!

However, a note on canonicals to clarify our issue with existing no-control system: we have no use for them on search engines or SERPs really, they are purely used as landing pages for paid ads liek adwords and/or other planned campaigns like social media targeted for demographics or localities, they will more than likely be considered duplicate content by search engines like google. we do not wish these pages to rank organically at all for anything. However, we need them not to count against us in our SEO efforts or in ranking the main version of our content (non-targeted, not used for ads, want it to rank, with very similar content striped of any such geo or demo info, canonical tagged from all those other duplicate content landing pages)

This is VERY VERY crucial if you have a business website that operates in more than one geographic location or has two distinct and fully different market demographics to target which will require separate landing pages, however, no matter how we go about it, we are wary that despite our best efforts these landing pages may be considered duplicate as the data on them can only be slightly changed anyway.

That is why I think it will incredibly reassuring to have control over this thing and be able to manually or in some other way set those pages canonical tags properly to the main generic version which is intended for organic ranking.

I quote from the same page you posted,

Q: Do the pages have to be identical?
A: No, but they should be similar. Slight differences are fine.

precisely why we worry what Google considers "slight" difference. it is as usual very vague and hard to define or bet on, so we would love to be able to play it safe.

I really do hope you guys can find an easy way for your team to implement these two crucial seo features... As a marketing company specializing in web, we are tired of wix only being touted as good for photographers, fashion designers, or newbies with 5 pages of static content! In fact we KNOW it is quite the contrary... Wix imho is an Israeli masterpiece, a showcase of a super genius idea and steadfast development and investment behind it, an invention of the century still quite a secret among webmasters... We have been testing and working and searching it for the past 3 years now. I can confirm we have been able to reduce cost to our clients SIGNIFICANTLY using wix and other 3rd party integrations possible with it, and we have been able to deliver major wix e-commerce sites that used to take 3-6 months dev time in 3-4 languages by a team of pro coders, and $20,000-$50,000 in cost, literally for a fraction of that price and within weeks instead. However, we are a bit stuck with these SEO issues and a couple of other features and issues... including SSL which are not as big a deal as all of our checkouts and forms are SSL anyway, but it just gives a better feel to client to see that https on certain pages, although embedded forms all have seals and are all SSL or TLS based on various uses....

So to sum up, I cannot wait until you guys announce availability of 301 & canonical controls for wix users...

[WixSeoTeam]

RayMa,

Thank you for your great feedback.

Mapping old urls to new urls is definitely  a must have. We will do our best to deliver it.

Canonical - It looks like canonical control will make sense for your needs. We will check it.

Having said that, I don't think canonicals are a showstopper. If you think that each locality needs its own version, then search engines may understand it as well. An answer by Google for a similar issue (a bit old)  "@felipus I would not recommend using rel=canonical or 301 redirects if you are creating content for different geographic areas as this would most likely make geotargeting more difficult. " full post

[Raydon]

First off, may I say a GIANT THANK YOU for this very sudden and active responsiveness! for a minute that silence was scaring us... but this is VERY ENCOURAGING! and I appreciate your private clarifications for our clients website.

We're good on bing, we tested it again and it was a mistake on our part for unpublished meta information. you are correct, BING DOES SEE WIX HTML5

I see, good move then for 404s, i hadn't actually encountered one since long time ago when on flash, where the giant wix logo would pop up... but that is fixed, i just tested it with html5 and am satisfied with the end result. no more need for a custom 404 as bad as before, this we can live with

301s are really an issue for some of our websties as we are in love with html5 platform and would really like to convert them properly, with the 301s giving the existing page authority and backlink juice to the new exact equals, not the new homepage. reason for this: specific purpose and local-only landing pages and content.

Google may get 404 on the seo version. this is VERY CONCERNING!!!! what good is a 301 redirect if google gets a 404 instead... i mean i know users will be forwarded, but google can never see where that page went... and there goes all the ranking and authority down the drain.

On canonicals: we will be needing this as we WILL have duplicate content on various landing pages designed for different localities and ad campaigns with otherwise super similar content. it is very important for us not get in trouble for this and be able to manually tag only one of those pages as the main source and canonical the others to that page. these campaigns will include adwords, and many many social media activities and you can see why we will probably benefit from having different versions as landing pages designated for each area or purpose.

I must say, if canonicals and 301s are somehow brought under users control [either directly via wix platform, or somehow using a form or a special page on wix-much like the flash to html5 converter... but plz not as broken ;)] our worries for wix seo will pretty much be dead!!!! and we have a ton of website clients we have not risked approaching yet as we had to clarify all of this solidly with wix before we could offer them SEO services or consulting on wix sites.

However, I must say, that all this is making wix suddenly so much more appealing to me as the SEO specialist of our small firm. I had very little way before to confirm or even get answers for any of this as you know those forums take a few tries before a non-robot shoots something worthy back and its very tiring and frustrating for those of us who know a little more than the avg user. I have perhaps asked all of this before over there and have gotten no answers comparable to yours here, not really even close!!!! YOU ARE DOING GREAT SO FAR

Once this is all set and done, I will personally update some of those threads and linking them back to this page, this page is already ranking very well for "wix seomoz" and I'm sure a ton of people who really need trusted and accurate data, do search for this term.... Maybe i can even write a blog post for youmoz explaining all of our findings and experience, as well as confirmed responses from you guys. would love to actually do that once all is set and done! You know what, its actually on my to do list as of now, being worked on and its final version will be pending final clarification on above remaining issues.

Thanks again and waiting to hear back!

[WixSeoTeam]

@RayMa

Canonical: Search engines do not read the source code, they read the seo version of the pages. For the page http://about.wix.com/affiliate#!faq/cq3g Google will extract the data from the seo page http://about.wix.com/affiliate?escaped_fragment=faq/cq3g and here you see the correct canonical.

301 redirects: Very good point! We should solve it. Viewer will usually get the homepage for any invalid path, e.g. mydomain.com/invalidpath#!invalidhash will display the homepage. Google may get 404 on the seo version.

404: As said, users can rarely see 404 page as invalid urls are displaying the homepage.

Bing: Bing follows the Ajax Crawling and index internal pages, e.g. search _"​How much commission do Wix affiliates earn?" _and you will see the faq page from the first example. Please contact us with the site details so we can check your case.

[Raydon]

@wixseo

Thank you for this very precise explanation.

I can confirm also that pages are being indexed correctly in google. but please read below.

So can i just ask that you or someone in the know from community  to clarify for me here, why is it that despite the fact that all pages are canonical tagged back to homepage, howcome when i target for a specific keyphrase without using quotes or anything on google, it is able to pull up a correct subpage of an html5 website and display that as a stand alone result?

I thought based on what i had read and learned, that when a page is canonical tagged for another, it no longer ranks for the term searched that is on it, and instead it will make the other page rank for it instead.

I understand Matt Cutts said in his canonical explanation video that Google reserves the right to ignore canonical tags if its user or webdev is shooting himself in the foot with it and am wondering have i gotten this whole canonical tag thing wrong all this time or is this something that google has pulled or something else and i cannot find a better place to ask this and have it cleared.

also, 301 redirects are a big missing must from our SEO CP for one very obvious reason, a wix flash site and domain being changed to a wix html5 site, will lose all of its link and page juice gained before and basically has to start over and not only that but all old links will be 404d and broken...

speaking of 404s, wix seo team ought to know how useful custom 404s are.... compared to what we show users now which is totally generic and does not cut it for finding the right thing or even retaining one bit of bouncers....

on these two separate notes and basically feature requests, i would like to thank you again for your thorough and clear response and am awaiting your further clarification WIX SEO

Thank you

ps. I do have proof for my claims above from an html5 wix site that i built a while back and i can confirm all pages on escaped fragment version point back to homepage and main domain, yet certain keyword searches bring about different and specific pages of this website into  the SERPs. btw this only happens in google, bing cannot see any sub-pages for this website and will not even return the result that google does for a "phrase search" if you need to see them, i can send you a private message as i do not want client name and domain or anything related to them to be crawled and ranked for in here..... matter of fact, bing cannot even see any text on this site's homepage to show underneath the result. it only sees the main domain and title. which is kind of sad as little of a search player as they may be. its being forced to ignore a slice of search market due to wix's current limitations. but i am not complaining about that as i can personally care less for my own clients and sites as google is enough of a river with plenty ol fish. was just pointing it out since i do have a connection live to wix seo on a very relevant and now deep topic in the perfect seo spot in the world.... so maybe that can also get some love

[TheEspresseo]

Thanks. Ok looks like my client's individual pages, including their page-specific rel=canonicals are in fact being indexed. So far so good.

In this case, to address your question, I had had a need for a cross-domain rel=canonical. I no longer need it because the case is closed. But there are real-world use cases for it.

[WixSeoTeam]

Espresseo,

There is no option to change canonicals manually. The reason we have the canonical tag, at the moment, is to double verify that different variations of url, if exists, will all have canonical to the same page. For each one of your pages you can see the version Google sees and check if the canonical was set properly. To see mydomain.com go to mydomain.com/?escaped_fragement and to see mydomain.com/#!page/id go to mydomain.com/?escaped_fragment=page/id

Why do you want to change canonicals? If there is a real need then we may consider a solution for this. We always keep in mind that wrong usage of canonicals can harm users.

I think that seeing your pages indexed correctly on Google is a good sign that everything is working as expected. We follow all Ajax Crawling instructions as well as all cloaking rules and there are millions of Wix pages indexed on Google for a long time without any quality issues. There is no way to manipulate the seo versions of the pages, it serves automatically the same content the users sees.

[TheEspresseo]

Wix, where can I go to edit the canonical tags for the escaped fragment versions of the pages on my client's Wix site? What you are saying makes sense to me conceptually, but I don't see where I  can edit anything but the one canonical tag. Once I do, how do I verify that it's being served to Google?

I would also be curious to verify that this crawling solution will not get sites penalized for cloaking. It does appear that Google has Ajax crawling guidelines, but I need to be assured that these are being followed and working as expected. (Sorry for my ignorance here--I'm not a developer and the client's on a budget. The crux of the value Wix brings is that it's accessible to non-developers.)

[WixSeoTeam]

I am sorry for the delayed response and I will try to address all the above issues.

Wix SEO is based on Google Ajax Crawling solution for dynamic ajax pages. You can read the Google documentation here, https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started In short, Wix instructs search engines to read the content in a special version of the page which contains all the content in the source code of the page, unlike the original dynamic page. This is an acceptable solution in the industry and as you can see, Google indexes all pages content. Ajax crawling solution works nowadays for both Flash and Html sites.

SEOMOZ Issues. Although Ajax Crawling is fully supported by search engines, it is not fully supported by many third parties tools. We will check if we can work it out with SEOMOZ great tool.

Canonical urls - Since Search engines are extracting all data from the escaped fragment pages, the canonical tags in the escaped fragment are what's matters and not the ones in the viewer version (the version user's sees). Viewer version always shows root canonical (in fact it displays the same code for all pages). RayMa, please take a look at the escaped fragment versions of your pages and let me know if the canonical tags are set properly

Cloaking (Sorina) - As mentioned above, Wix is following all Ajax Crawling guidelines, whenever Google bot sees a page with Ajax Crawling meta tag, , or a url with hashbang, #!, then the bot goes directly to the seo version of the page.

404 links on Google Analytics (David) - Can you provide us some links so we can check it?

Please let me know if I have missed anything.

[Raydon]

wix has been incredibly cold-shouldery about this whole thing... very canned responses everywhere, no legitimate explanation of why this happens, and why they cannot find a better way to do it, not even a tat on "we're working on this to increase web admin's options for 301s or canonicals. i can assure you they are not hard to code into a platform like wix, all they need to give users is a little control panel much like they have introduced for pages on html5 where you can set separate metadata, etc. with buttons and modes for 301s and canonicals.

it is also my pure guess-based on my understanding of how google handles these canonical tags, and since wix does not want to clear the air- that there is a lazy reason at wix for this situation-to answer my own question this way:

Google has stated that they reserve the right to IGNORE canonical tags when they so feel like based on their understanding of the websites- ie if they see webdev is shooting themselves in the foot with canonicals, they can ignore it and treat that particular page stand-alone.

FOR THIS, I can see how wix could have gotten a little lazy with this and said to themselves, we just set all pages to canonical tag homepage instead, and whenever google sees a page worthy of standalone ranking and treatment, it does so on its own terms.

which would nonetheless be a terrible and uber lackluster approach to a delicate matter such as SEO & CRO, especially for small business clients who cannot afford a $20,000 custom coded e-commerce page.

a good 80% of all you need for SEO is there, missing are minute controls over individual page canonical tags, 301 redirects, and a proper blog- which can btw be remedied atm with a paid wordpress hookup supposedly.

WIX, we need CLEAR answers.

we also need you to clear this across the board

here is just one of the probably many threads on your forum relating to the specifically mentioned topics above. PLEASE RESPOND & ELABORATE

[BuddyvonRippey]

Having the exact same troubles as mentioned above by RayMa.. Would be amazing if SeoMoz and Wix could get rid of these bugs.

In addition, SeoMoz continues to show zero links/activity, (after multiple crawls) (and being both verified and connected through google analytics) the only thing SeoMoz shows is 1rel canonical warning. This is frustrating because i want to see where i stand with links vs my competitors. Of course i can use google webmaster tools, but i would much rather use the services of SeoMoz.

When i do run google webmaster tools, I have a handful of 404 errors reading  "escaped_fragment_=untitled/zoom/canh/image" ... This url appears as http://www.bizrevamp.com/#!untitled/zoom/mainPage/image114q

this is also confusing... any help would be brilliant!

Regards, seomoz aspirant, Buddy

[TheEspresseo]

Didn't see this post. Interesting.

[TheEspresseo]

It depends on what you are using the rel canonical for. In our case we were changing domains entirely and I could not 301 the old URLs to the new (both domains located the same content), so I really needed the rel canonicals to work. In the long run I figured out 1. how to 301 the old URLs and 2. how to update the rel canonical on the homepage of the Wix site. All the pages on the Wix site I was working with were dynamic, so they didn't have unique, static URLs. Between the domain change, the 301s, the one rel canonical I was able to update, a little bit of extra keyword rich text on the home page, some directory submittals, and a handful of links, I was able to get a few #1 rankings, as well as some top 3 and top 10 rankings for keywords among those we were targeting. The client was on a budget so the targets weren't too ambitious, and we didn't have the resources to overhaul the site entirely. Also for some reason they were emotionally committed to hosting and managing their site via WIX. It turned out ok given their budget and goals.

Ceteris paribus, if you have a choice, and inbound traffic matters to you, you ought to stay away from Wix. The convenience Wix offers can be had without paying for it with the lack of flexibility and control tech-minded inbound marketers value.

[Raydon]

To wix SEO team

I just got off the phone with your wonderful phone support staff and still have somethings i need to address here.

first and foremost, I think seomoz is not wix html5 (not flash) friendly or vice versa, and that wix  is rather google friendly. these are my experiences as described below - see questions too to see what i mean.

in google, i have managed to get wix flash sites high rankings (currently a few webpages -master pages- are ranking in top 3 for their keywords. so i cant realy approve of the notion that wix flash is not seo friendly, because i have seen it in action and it is rather seo friendly. he who says nay, does not know the site well enough and has had inadequate experience using it.

and its been OVER a year since we ran those pages and we've only seen everything go up with regards to seo. there are tricks and tips you need to know though to make sure you rank well (h1 and title tags, etc)

However, when it comes to SEO for wix html5 websites, i still have a few things I need to clarify with both seomoz and wix staff's help

1. I would like to know more about how and why seomoz system sees/shows only 1 page (and when there are multiple non-sub page, main webpages visible through wix editor) for wix html5 websites (this is not an issue with multiple master pages with flash, they are seen properly).this has been tested on multiple html5 based wix sites now, both hooked and connected to GA accounts as well and both show only 1 page, the root domain homepage with 1 rel canonical tag from the page to itself. both of these websites have more than a few separate webpages that ought to function independently at least when it comes to being indexed or crawled.

with regards to this problem, there rises another issue that remains vague to me: I know google indexes all text and image content on html5 sites as i have ran site:domain.com keyword test and it sees them. however in seomoz, i only see a bunch of dashes in front of all my keywords for html5 sites (these are not optimized at all and are rather new domains so rankings are very low naturally) and i cannot verify or tell whether they are being seen and are not in top 50 results or they cant be read or seen by seomoz bot and crawler. google sees all of them and shows the correct internal url page result when you do a site search test. just want to confirm that seomoz can also see them

2. on wix flash, why are rel canonical tags to the root domain from every single separate master page changing up and down from seomoz's point of crawl? I mean, i have not made any changes to the site in question in 3 months and my number of rel canonical tags have gone up AND down constantly without ANY edits being made to the site in the same time period of 2+ months,

3. why can't we get sitelinks the same nice way that we can get with wix flash sites in your html5, this is a big deal.

and finally i have an open question to seomoz and wix staff both:

why or why not is it a good/bad idea to have all of your webpages rel canonical tag the homepage and transfer all seo points gained and attributes to the main domain. i am lead to believe that this is what wix does automatically across both flash and html5 platforms, at least this is what seomoz seems to be reporting.

---

in the end i would like to thank all of you wonderful and helpful people at both companies in advance and would like to mention that we are looking forward to using both companies services in conjunction with one another to build nice and cheap websites for our clients and also be able to optimize them well and be able to show and report on all of those efforts properly (what is currently crippled due to issue #1 above). particularly using the html5 site builder. I am sure there are swaths similar minded people like me albeit in the dark and in silence who are wishing they could use the new html5 sites with seomoz the same way flash ones work. i hope there will be more compatibility among the two and good constructive answers to my questions and challenges above.

[SorinaDascalu]

Hi Eitan and thank you for your answer.

These lines are taken exactly from the Google Webmasters Help:

--begin quote:

Some examples of cloaking include:

• Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users
• Inserting text or keywords into a page only when the User-agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor

-- end quote - source here

When they refer to serve the bots their own version of the content they mean it on the same page, through image alts, noscript tags, etc. They don't talk about creating other pages just for search engines.

[WixSeoTeam]

Hi Sorina,

Serving Google with as HTML version with the same content isn't cloacking. **Cloaking **refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines.

If you'll go and read about it more on Google Help Center you will find out that Google is recommending different ways to serve pages and content to his bots in case they can't see the original content (JavaScript, Flash, Videos, Dynamic Content and more). Basically, Google is asking webmasters to serve the content users see in a way his bots will understand.

So is totally OKto serve Google bots their own version as long as it is exactly the same as the content viewed by the users.

Again, I recommend you read more about it on Google Webmaster Help, but I can ensure you that WIX users are enjoying a great level of SEO whether their sites are build with our HTML5 editor or with our Flash editor.

I hoped I clarified your question.

Eitan

[WixSeoTeam]

Hi Sorina,

Serving Google with as HTML version with the same content isn't cloacking. **Cloaking **refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines.

If you'll go and read about it more on Google Help Center you will find out that Google is recommending different ways to serve pages and content to his bots in case they can't see the original content (JavaScript, Flash, Videos, Dynamic Content and more). Basically, Google is asking webmasters to serve the content users see in a way his bots will understand.

So is totally OKto serve Google bots their own version as long as it is exactly the same as the content viewed by the users.

Again, I recommend you read more about it on Google Webmaster Help, but I can ensure you that WIX users are enjoying a great level of SEO whether their sites are build with our HTML5 editor or with our Flash editor.

I hoped I clarified your question.

Eitan

[SorinaDascalu]

Hi Eitan,

I quote you here: "Wix came up with the solution of auto-generating HTML versions for each Flash site and serving the Html version to the search engines bots on the server side."

Isn't this cloacking (presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines)? That's a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines!

[WixSeoTeam]

Hi Guys, My name is Eitan and I am the SEO manager for WIX.com. I would like to try and clarify some issues raised here, so you will get a full picture regarding the SEO level for sites generated by Wix. Previously, sites were generated with Wix were based on Flash in the client side and seo was an issue for Wix to deal with and find a solution. In order to overcome the seo challenges, Wix came up with the solution of auto-generating HTML versions for each Flash site and serving the Html version to the search engines bots on the server side. So, the end results in terms of seo for Wix's Flash sites were very good. We can proudly say, that the seo level for those sites were well above the average seo level of most internet sites around the web. After explaining about Wix Flash sites seo, I would like to present much bigger news.... Since March 2012, we launched our new HTML5 editor which enables users to build themselves a free Html5 website. I encourage you to visit our sites and check hundreds of new and amazing Html5 templates. Our Html5 sites, are seo friendly and present top level of seo by using AJAX crawling, schema and microdata, adjusting your page titles and description, optimizing you images and more. Our users should know that by using the seo widget inside the editors, they are able to optimize their sites even more. I would like to conclude by saying that Wix sites (both Flash & Html5) have a decent level of SEO, and to ensure our users that they enjoy a well above market level of seo. I will be happy to answers any questions you may have in the future as well. Regards, Eitan Helman Seo Team Manager - Wix.com

[Raydon]

if you dont mind,

what was your need for doing this

and

what was your workaround

im interested to know here

BUMP! 2013

[TheEspresseo]

Thanks. Figured out a workaround.

[jkundrotas]

As far as I know, there is no way to edit rel canonical in Wix sites. The only option I see is to try to contact their support and ask to solve your problem. But personally I haven't tried to ask anything regarding the code change.

[TheEspresseo]

I've got a client with a Wix site and I need to edit their rel canonical tags--does anyone on here happen to know whether that's possible?

[WixSeoTeam]

Hi Karl (and the rest),

My name is Nir and I manage the SEO development effort in Wix.com.

I want to clear some thing regarding Wix.com and SEO.

Wix is a flash based website builder but as some mentioned for every Flash website that you build Wix is automatically generates a search engine friendly HTML edition of the site so that the site will be visible to search engine.

Wix.com site is build using Wix technology and we're doing fine in SE positions and traffic.

We're constantly working on improving our platform SEO and many of the latest changes that we did came from our users requests and comments.

We're working on enabling different description along side other advance SEO properties. (soon we plan implemented Schema.org for our eCommerce solution).

Please feel free to ask anything and I'll try to answer any SEO related question you might have.

Nir Sagiv

UPDATE: our eCommerce solution is currently implemented using micro-formats and we're working on schema.org implementation in the future.

[jkundrotas]

Hi Karl, Stefano & Asif,

we're currently testing wix cms. Wix is great creativity tool, but it has some serious seo problems. It's correct that their websites are flash based, but we can confirm that their content are crawlable by google. There are other serious things - users cannot add any custom meta tags in the code level (head, body), also you will not be able to change anything in website hosting level. You can add any meta title and description, but this will be applied to the whole website (not page level). So you won't have different meta titles and descriptions (please note that google may change your titles and/or descriptions in their SERPS, so sometimes it doesn't matter). It must be said that currently wix have improved in handling these issues - they included 'rel canonical' and different meta titles - now they are constructed as follow - Website title + Page name, so it may be something like "My Website | My page". Meta descriptions are still the issue. Currently we are testing this cms, so we cannot recommend to use it or not, as you may know, flash, ajax is not recommended by most seo.

Some tips: - always use so called "masterpages" - these only are real web pages

- don't read their help on seo - it's very old and there are some major mistakes (like making no difference between image "alt" and "title", recommendations to use keywords tag and so on).

[AsafY]

AFAIK Wix is SEO friedly,

I don't have any first hand experience with it but I think they have an HTML Filter to help with SEO

"Wix sites are built using Flash. Although search engine robots cannot index Flash content, Wix developed a solution. As a user builds his or her Wix site, xml files are generated translate the site’s text and content into pure HTML"

look at the following thread: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6e1a376d2d64f5c3&hl=en

Asaf.

[stefanok]

Hi Karl

WIX is a great tool for building websites easily. Unfortunately, WIX is not SEO friendly as it is a FLASH based.

Flash is a big no no for SEO as the SERPS cant read flash and images.

Regards

Stef