On October 14, 2015 Search Engine Land wrote an article that Google had dropped Wix.com pages out of their index. Google officially confirmed that they were working on getting Wix sites back into their search engine.
This is no surprise, I have been saying this back in May 2012 blog post about how Wix sucks for a platform for any professional type of website and that it is extremely unfriendly when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aka search engine visibility. You can read an in depth article on Wix SEO I wrote a while back. I will be going over other SEO factors and my overall reason why you should avoid Wix for building your website no matter what the Wix reviews say out there on the internet.
Wix.com Reviews
Wix.com is an affiliate platform. This means any blogger or anyone with a website that is getting quite a bit of traffic can put an affiliate link on their site and promote Wix and get a commission when people pay for Wix’s service. This starts blurring the truth about whether a product or service is actually a good product or service. The most popular thing to do as a blogger is to write a review. A good Wix review will get you tons of traffic on the keywords alone. But these bloggers aren’t developers, they know nothing about code, and very little about SEO or how a website would help promote itself in the search engines. All they are doing is hyping a services because they want you to buy it. So know any Wix review website probably has alternative motives and you should really do your research before you decide on any platform. Usually if you go to the 2 or 3rd page of a search result those pages are probably going to be a little more informative because they aren’t trying to get on the first page to cash in on a Wix review.
Wix.com SEO
In an older article I analyzed a Wix HTML 5 website and pointed out the many bad practices Wix as a platform has when it comes to being SEO friendly. I recommend you check that article out here. On top of all those things, I dove a little deeper and decided to analyze the so called “source code” of a Wix website. Wix.com actually tries to send a google bot to a separate page. This separate page is not the actual source code of the website, but for some reason Google has allow this. (well obviously Google didn’t like it too much because they dropped tons of Wix sites from their index) This is not the standard way of serving up content to Google spiders and in fact I think it actually goes against Google guidelines of serving a user one set of content and serving Google’s bots a different set of content. It is for sure a gray area, and probably why Google dropped Wix out of their index this October. As you can see below this would be the page that Google’s search engine crawler would be redirected to.
Notice the escape fragment text. Now the original page url looks like this.
Now right off the bat can you see something very interesting? Look a little harder! The page titles aren’t the same! The escape fragment page, the page that Google sees has a completely different page title than what the website owner has assigned! Wix SEO App Point? What the hell is that? It’s something you as a user have not control over (I am assuming since I don’t use Wix). More than likely this is hard coded into their code base and it’s totally jacking up unique page titles. Unique page titles are SEO 101 guys. So how can Wix claim to be SEO friendly when they are clearly breaking one of the first best practices of SEO, unique page titles. Let me make this a little more clear, I Googled Wix SEO in quotes and on page 4 you can see all these completely different Wix sites have all the same page titles. Check out this screen shot of Google’s index.
Bottom line is Wix.com is not a professional website, don’t believe the Wix Reviews hype! Their system is completely flawed. So much so that Wix sites are dropping from Google’s search results. So if you are a business owner do NOT use Wix for building your website. If you are a do it yourself type and want a simple drag and drop style website I recommend Ultimatum, it’s built on WordPress, which is king when it comes to an SEO platform. Not to mention it’s open source so you have complete control over the output of code. Check it out below (yes it’s an affiliate link but this is a quality system! Trust me.)
