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

[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]

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]

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.

[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

[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]

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,

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]

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...