I'm a newb, built a website with Wix want to redirect it to a domain I own, but am reading that Wix is bad for this
-
Hi,
I am building this site for my boss http://charlesfridmanpr.wix.com/real-estate and am still working on it.
I'm getting close to the stage where I want to redirect it to the URL we want to use, but in reading these forums, it says that because all of subpages (?) have a # in them, they will not be read or indexed by google.
I am very new to this, and while it may not look like it, the website has taken me quite a while to design. Is there a way to fix this? We want to appear high up for a non competitive keyword.
Thanks
-
Thanks Tom,
I guess I made a mistake going with Wix, I will see if their support or forums can help out more with the issue.
Our current website is a Wordpress one, but it has almost nothing on it, and looks like a blog. I'm just an admin at the company, and the owner wanted a website with his bio. I did a couple on the Godaddy Web builder, and thought I could make him proud with a bigger website. It looks like that was a mistake as his only goal was to get a page about him near the top, and instead he'll have a website he didn't want, not achieving the only goal he had.
Sorry, went into vent mode there. Thanks again for the help.
-
Take this as advice since you claim to be a "newb"....NEVER use Wix for professional web design or development jobs.
But back to your question..according to Google, those pages will still be crawled as long as you adhere to their guidelines.
Now in my opinion, if a URL contains any character other than a "-" in between words or a "?" to generate products dynamically in your shopping cart, then it's not a good URL.
However, we've all seen websites rank for keywords that don't even contain the targeted keyword on the page. But if you're target keywords are very non-competitive, sometimes having just the target keyword in the page title is all you need.
I'm sure most here on Moz would agree that you're better off moving to a CMS and/or framework of some kind (WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore, etc.) from here on out.
I would never want my real estate client to have to use a URL like this "/real-estate#!543-second-avenue/is8ls" on advertisements, listings, and signs. Also, how would they directly point any phone leads to specific pages on the website? Sure you could create nice and clean 301 redirects to those pages but it will be tough to manage and quite frankly it's pointless. Their are platforms available such as WordPress that are easier to set up and manage depending on how complex you want to be.
So, my solution is to move away from Wix. And if that is not an option due to time (which it seems like it is for this project), then I would be on the phone with Wix, on their forums, in their online community talking and learning from everyone I can to make sure that your website is optimized for SEO and that their system doesn't get your pages neglected in Google due to URL structure.
I wish you the best of luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What's the best way to use redirects on a massive site consolidation
We are migrating 13 websites into a single new domain and with that we have certain pages that will be terminated or moved to a new folder path so we need custom 301 redirects built for these. However, we have a huge database of pages that will NOT be changing folder paths and it's way too many to write custom 301's for. One idea was to use domain forwarding or a wild card redirect so that all the pages would be redirected to their same folder path on the new URL. The problem this creates though is that we would then need to build the custom 301s for content that is moving to a new folder path, hence creating 2 redirects on these pages (one for the domain forwarding, and then a second for the custom 301 pointing to a new folder). Any ideas on a better solution to this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
I've screwed up. Domain pointers I forgot about. Think I am getting dinged by google.
Hey all. I setup some domain pointers for a client 8 years ago and now think they are hurting them. I am afraid google thinks it duplicate content. They are pointers so you can get to the same page using other domain names. Is my best approach to do a 301 redirect on them? The client is on a shared host so I have to use the web.config file. The site is pretty small so doing it for the 10+ pages is not that big of a deal. My question is this? When should I drop those pointers from the website altogether?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DougDeVore0 -
Moving to https with a bunch of redirects my programmer can't handle
Hi Mozzers, I referred a client of mine (last time) to a programmer that can transition their site from http to https. They use a wordpress website and currently use EPS Redirects as a plugin that 301 redirects about 400 pages. Currently, the way EPS redirects is setup (as shown in the attachment) is simple: On the left side you enter your old url, and on the the right side is the newly 301'd url. But here's the issue, since my client made the transition to https, the whole wordpress backend is setup that way as well. What this means is, if my client finds another old http url that he wants to redirect, this plugin only allows them to redirect https to https. As of now, all old http to https redirects STILL work even though the left side of the plugin switched all url's to a default HTTPS. But my client is worried the next plugin update he will lose all http to https redirects. While asking our programmer to add all 400 redirects to .htaccess, he states that's too many redirects and could slow down the website. Well, we don't want to lose all 400 301's and jeopardize our SEO. Question: what does everyone suggest as an alternative solution/plugin to redirect old http urls to https and future https to https urls? Thank you all! Ol8km
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Bad Domain Links - Penguin? - Moz vs. Search Console Stats?
I've been trying to figure out why my site www.stephita.com has lost it's google ranking the past few years. I had originally thought it was due to the Panda updates, but now I'm concerned it might be because of the Penguin update. Hard for me to pinpoint, as I haven't been actively looking at my traffic stats the past years. So here's what I just noticed. On my Google Search Console - Links to your Site, I discovered there are 301 domains, where over 75% seem to be spammy. I didn't actively create those links. I'm using the MOZ - Open site Explorer tool to audit my site, and I noticed there is a smaller set of LINKING DOMAINS, at about 70 right now. Is there a reason, why MOZ wouldn't necessarily find all 300 domains? What's the BEST way to clean this up??? I saw there's a DISAVOW option in the Google Search Console, but it states it's not the best way, as I should be contacting the webmasters of all the domains, which is I assume impossible to get a real person on the other end to REMOVE these link references. HELP! 🙂 What should I do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TysonWong0 -
We're planning a major website redevelopment - SEO Considerations?
We're currently planning a website rehaul, with a new site to be designed and implemented on our existing Drupal 7 platform. I've outlined the following areas to consider: Listing out top content by traffic, conversions, ranking and bounce rates to ensure top content continues to get relevant links throughout site (in particular high internal PA links!). Maintaining a specific KW target for each page Ensuring on-page SEO guidelines remain (i.e. img alt tags, headings and page titles) Having a low page load speed Ensuring architecture of site is built around our keyword methodology What else I need to be aware of? I'm predicting a drop in traffic as this tends to follow redesigns but looking to make this as minimal as possible. Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam.at.Moz0 -
Is there any ranking benefit to buying and redirecting high PageRank domains?
Hello, I'm interested in learning how to assume ownership of a site without Google resetting the PageRank and the links back to zero. I've read that buying sites is one of the most powerful SEO "shortcuts" you can employ, but can be tricky. I've heard that, unfortunately, buying an existing domain and 301 redirecting for SEO credit is not that simple. When the WHOIS registration information on the newly purchased domain is updated to reflect its transfer to you, the new owner, that domain will almost immediately be reset by Google to a PageRank=0. That's the standard practice when a domain changes hands. Since Google is a domain registrar, obviously, change of ownership information is readily available for their use in factoring it into their algorithms. If you decide to 301 redirect the new domain to another domain you already own, you will get credit for the site's current incoming link profile, at least in the short-term. However, this purchased domain will eventually reset to PR=0 (usually during the next PageRank update) AND you will then get no credit for all of those links post-transfer. What is your experience with buying and redirecting domains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice0 -
When should you redirect a domain completely?
We moved a website over to a new domain name. We used 301 redirects to redirect all the pages individually (around 150 redirects). So my question is, when should we just kill the old site completely and just redirect (forward/point) the old domain over to the new one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | co.mc0 -
How do i migrate from Volusion to Magento with the same domain using 301 redirect?
We are thinking about migrating our site from Volusion to Magento due to traffic reasons, our site's been growing and we're going way over the bandwidth limit (40gb) for Volusion every month. It only make sense for us to start on Magento CE where we can host it on our site and use our own bandwidth. We will be using the same domain, and changing our URLs to make things better (we were somewhat restricted by Volusion so we couldn't optimize some of our URL addresses). Here's comes the main question, since we are ranking pretty good for the keywords that we're targeting, we ABSOLUTELY DON'T want to lose any traffic or ranking from our pages, I know that there's something called the 301 redirect that we can use, but how can this be done? When we migrate the site, we will need to point our domain to Magento from Volusion, so basically Volusion store will be down... if we are changing domain names then the 301 redirect makes sense because we can have the original store live while it's redirecting to a completely new address. Is there any method to still setup this 301 redirect, or is there something else I can do to save our rankings??? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s2bkevin0