Wix and SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

May 08, 2013 articles, seo

A real Wix and SEO evaluation

There are quite a few sites out there giving Wix.com good reviews but take a closer look and you will see most are just affiliate sites trying to make money off you, and giving out bad information. Some are pretty obvious, others are quite sneaky! The sneaky ones will setup a URL that looks legitimate, like www.reviewerwebsiteurl.com/wix, but if you notice the landing page after you click on the link, a redirect to Wix.com, has a long string of text and includes “campaign=af_reviewerswebsiteurl.com”. This is an affiliate marketer cashing in on writing a long article raving how good Wix is to get on the first page of Google and cash in on it’s misguided information.

You should notice any url redirects or any RAW url displayed at the bottom of your browser when you hover a link. If any of these include “campaign=af_reviewerswebsiteurl.com”, you can pretty much deem that site or article as invalid.

Is Wix really SEO friendly?

I decided to look a little closer under the hood of Wix.com and look at their so called SEO friendliness they claim they have. I pulled a site that was advertised on their site as one of the “designs” you easily create yourself aka one of their client showcases, it was an actual company’s site. And the site was in the industry of SEO and Web Design, obviously using Wix as their platform. The site description and meta data for this site was “Advertising, branding, marketing, SEO and web design.”

We will be analyzing the code of an HTML5 Wix.com developed website. I have compiled a list of things that were in my opinion and by most SEO standards, not something that is SEO optimized or friendly. If you want to skip to the overall status, Wix.com is not SEO friendly or a platform that I would use for any SEO purposes. Not to say you can’t rank with Wix but there are way better options out there for an SEO friendly platform. The king being WordPress!

I would first like to point out the wording that is commented out for the actual HTML code that you have to copy and paste to see the “real” HTML code of the site is very misleading.

<!-- Looking for this page's SEO Code?
You can find it at http://www.{hiddenurl}.com/?_escaped_fragment_
Wix.com's brand new HTML5 editor supports the latest SEO technologies 
including AJAX Crawling For more information about AJAX Crawling visit http://bit.ly/ajaxcrawling -->
<!-- META DATA -->

You should know that HTML code is not SEO code. SEO has many layers and HTML alone does not dictate Search Engine Optimization.

First is the URLs
Despite popular belief the URL below is not a friendly URL. There is no need for #! and why do they need random letters at the end, the only readable text is crammed in between gibberish.

www.{hiddenurl}.com/#!products/cnuo

Non Friendly Image URLs/Naming conventions
Images should have somewhat of a relative name to the actual file name, doing so is not only user friendly but does help your images rank in Google Images.

media/6d2987_0993e3551490d470d5bd039021a5e67e
.png_srz_263_83_85_22_0.50_1.20_0.00_png_srzImages

H3 Tag starts Headers and repeats on all headers.
No Header Conventions and no H1 tag! The first H tag I found was H3 and it was repeated throughout the site. This is SEO basics, you put the important “titles” in header tags, and H1 has the biggest power! If you are just repeating styles, go ahead and create a css style class and don’t repeat a crucial HTML element that could help rank your site.

<h3>{Hidden Site Header Tex}</h3>

No Image Alt text
Every image should contain an alt text describing the image, in this case this is a facebook icon, and should have alt text of the company name and facebook, or something similar. Adding alt helps adding content for the images and adding company info or even keywords helps rankings. SEO 101! Not to mention the URL for this image isn’t even the website owner’s URL but a media folder on Wix.com.

<img src="http://static.wix.com/media/da00086a27cc2c52ec7a11ec468c4d29.wix_mp" 
itemprop="contentURL" width="205" height="205"/>

Empty Title Text
As with the alt text there should be some title text describing the image or link. In this case it was there but empty a empty code takes up space and bogs down load time.  Not that it will put that much load time on, but it’s just not clean code and if the tag is there shouldn’t it be filled in.

title="" itemprop="contentURL" width="331" height="200"

Scattered empty HTML tags
Clean code is important, I found a lot of random empty div tags and comments throughout the site.

<div id="cpua">
<h3></h3>
<h3>Title text was here.</h3>

<span id="HtmlCmpnnt0">
<!-- placeholder for component of data type=HtmlComponent -->
</span>
<span id="HtmlCmpnnt2">
<!-- placeholder for component of data type=HtmlComponent -->
</span>
<span id="FvGrdLn3">
<!-- placeholder for component of data type=None -->
</span>

Series of Blank Pages
I found 50 pages of blank content when I search Google’s index of the website!  That’s a huge amount. Normally having pages indexed is a good thing but not if they are blank! And there is word you can even get penalized from Google for having bunch of random pages that really don’t link anywhere or have no content, not to mention not very user friendly.

#!blank/{series of random numbers and letters}
#!untitled/zoom/{series of random numbers and letters} (50 pages!)