A Wix web page can sometimes cannot get indexed by search engines and it cannot appear on SERPs immediately after you submit the sitemap on Google Search Console. Even in case a certain amount of time passed, a page on your site wouldn't get indexed by Google.
Making a website visible on search engines is the first and fundamental task of any website's SEO. Wix websites come up with out of the box SEO tools and the Wix SEO apps you can integrate with your site but having all these features is not enough to make sure your website's SEO health is what search engines would like to see on your site.
We will take a closer look at the reasons causing Wix websites are not indexed by Google and try to find how to implement solutions for these pages and validate them on Google Search Console.
This tutorial will be a case study showing real-life efforts to make bizimuhit.com performs better in search results with almost no problem. In short, we create content in two different languages: English and Turkish. Turkish website operates under multilingual subdomain tr.bizimuhit.com. Problems shown on this case study mainly appeared after we made changes on page SEO settings of member pages, static pages, dynamic list pages, dynamic item pages, forum app pages, blog app pages, and converted blog and dynamic pages into multilingual. The main reason behind multilingual SEO was the updates released for apps and SEO settings over the years. If you are about converting your website into multilingual, we have also a lot to share with you during this case study. |
How to Find Wix Index Problems?
When you realize that one or more pages on your site do not appear on Google search results, you may wonder when and where the problem took place with example pages within a report.
First of all, you should connect your website to Google Search Console and verify your domain. Then, you should make sure you complete every step in Wix SEO Wiz.
After you complete all the tasks about your website's SEO, you can start checking the problems.
To view page indexing report:
Go to Google Search Console's dashboard, under your domain.
Click on Pages tab under Indexing title, on the left side of the screen.
Indexed pages are shown with green bars while not-indexed pages with gray on a timeline view.
Underneath this chart, you can find the page URLs that are currently not indexed by Google yet due to several reasons.
If you'd like to view only the issues included in your website's sitemap, you can change the view to "/sitemap.xml", which excludes the pages unsubmitted yet, submitted but not indexed pages or old/removed pages.
If you have just connected your site to Google Search Console, you will probably view only reports filtered by sitemap.
Reasons Preventing Pages Get Indexed
While your site may be crawled and indexed, Google cannot guarantee that every page on your site will also be crawled and indexed. It is important to remember that this is a completely normal situation.
There are many reasons for engines not to crawl or index your pages even in case your website is designed with SEO in-mind. Here is you can see a list of reasons appear on Google Search Console's "Pages" tab.
Alternate page with proper canonical tag
Excluded by "no-index" tag
Blocked due to access forbidden (403)
Blocked due to other 4xx issue
Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user
Page with redirect
Not found (404)
Crawled - currently not indexed
Soft 404
Discovered - currently not indexed
If you are tracking your website's SEO performance from other SEO software like Semrush, SERanking, Ubersuggest, etc. you can also monitor the problems causing your webpages not to get indexed or properly get indexed by Google.
Here is you can find the issues found on our website by Ubersuggest:
Low word count
Duplicate meta descriptions
Duplicate title tags
Blocked from appearing in search engines
Without H1 heading
Broken links
No meta description
Returned 4xx status code
Title tag is too long
Title tag is too short
Poorly formatted URL for SEO
Now, let's try to understand why all these issues appeared on Google Search Console.
Alternate page with proper canonical tag
If a page is marked with "alternate page with proper canonical tag", you should know that there is an alternate page that points to the canonical page of your original page, which indexed. AMP pages, mobile version of a desktop canonical or desktop version of a mobile canonical can be an alternate page of your original website page.
Here is the example pages that Google Search Console share with us.
The list mainly points out the reasons for blog post, forum post and AMP pages but why didn't Google index these pages? Or did it crawl the old pages one more time?
Deleted/removed pages
AMP (accelerated mobile pages) was a part of mobile SEO for a long time ago. Google reduced the impact of AMP for mobile sites and then completely removed its impact on mobile SEO.
After Google updates the SEO algorithm, we have also turned off AMP settings on Wix blog app but after a while we realized that our organic traffic badly affected from that last change.
We hadn't set up any 301 redirects for old AMP pages because we were thinking that Wix will take care of all these.
Then, Google Search Console showed us that old AMP pages causing alternate content errors on the console.
We replaced all these AMP page URLs with those seem relevant to regular blog post URLs by setting up tens of new 301 redirects.
/amp/wix-website-cost -------> /post/wix-website-cost
Changed URLs
Over the years we recreated and restructured many content on different pages again and again likewise what we did for this article. We optimized page URLs for SEO to reflect the last changes in content and let URL to take less in number of characters. For example, wix-events-app-review URL was changed by something else.
User-generated content
Wix forum app automatically generates page URL extensions from the title of that forum post. Since noone is granted with a permission to edit user generated post URLs in Wix forum app, these URLs are indexed as how they appear on post page.
We deleted Wix forum app and redirected all URLs to our blog page. There were hundreds of forum posts and category pages on the site. So, this was the only option we can apply.
Since our website is multilingual, every forum post and category page used to get indexed under the main domain of the site. In short, the same content was getting indexed both by the main domain and the subdomain.
Since Wix haven't updated forum app yet for multilingual websites and its UI for responsive layout, we do not advice you to use this app (especially for multilingual websites).
Excluded by no-index tag
No-index directive prevents pages to get indexed by Google. If you want a page to get indexed, you should remove the "no-index" directive.
Subdomain indexing
When we created two separate content for each language, we should have sent index requests for the domains which those the contents were published in.
Pages that these errors appeared contain multilingual dynamic URL extensions or a part of multilingual blog post pages.
Some of the pages later indexed under tr subdomain whereas the rest of them were redirected to the healthy pages.
No-index directive
If you toggle the indexing switch on for page index, Google discovers, crawls and index that page. If you toggle that switch off, you give Google a no-index directive.
Instead of toggling off this switch, you can simply remove/delete a page that you no longer want.
Crawled - currently not indexed
When a page is crawled by Google but it is not indexed for search results yet, Google gives a page-indexing error named "crawled - currently not indexed".
Pages are generally not indexed after crawled due to they do not contain internal links.
Even though you don't need to resubmit the sitemap to Google for this reason, it would be good idea to update your content and include more links from other pages to that content or from that content to other pages on your site.
Discovered - currently not indexed
In order to prevent to overload the site, the pages already discovered by Google are not crawled at first attempt and Google reschedule the crawling. That's why last crawled date is shown as N/A on the report.
Not found (404)
When you remove or delete pages which Google already discovered, Googlebot keeps continue to try to index those pages until you redirect them to the pages available on sitemap.
Use 301 redirects only if you are not comfortable with the result of 404. If there are permanently deleted pages, you don't have to set up 301 redirects.
Page with redirects
When you change the slug of any pages except dynamic, app and router pages, Wix automatically redirects them from the old URL old URL to the new URL.
In order for Google to think that target URL is indexable, the source of the redirect should be a canonical URL, which means that the best representative page from a group of identical pages. Otherwise, that target URL might not be indexed since the source is a non-canonical URL.
Blocked due to access forbidden (403)
The pages that you do not grant access to site visitors for are blocked from Google due to the permission restriction.
If you make change about who will access to the page on the page settings and validate error on Google Search Console, the error on the report is marked as passed after a while.
How to Validate Wix Index Issues?
If you are good with the recent changes you made to fix the index issues, you can start validating the errors on Google Search Console.
Click one of the reasons under page indexing.
Click on "validate fix" button.
Repeat the same until you are done validating all fixes.
Googlebot will check out your pages' indexing and then if everything is as expected, it will validate your page so that the problem would be solved.
You will be notified about the validation process by email so you don't need to go to GSC and check the validation status day by day.
Validation Status
When you start the validation process, the status value turns into "Started". Depending on the result of the validation, you can see either "Failed" or "Passed".
How to Prevent Wix Index Issues?
Index issues detected on Wix websites rely on unstable product releases and updates about Wix SEO and changes made in member pages, blog tag pages, multilingual pages, etc. by Wix users.
Even though you cannot stop getting Wix app and website builder updates, you can prevent many index issues with the following:
If an app does not support multilingual translations yet, do not use it.
If you are not sure about member only pages' index status, don't make any change on the URLs or page settings.
If you don't complete all Wix SEO Wiz tasks, complete all soon. Wix SEO will guide you how to add meta titles and meta description so that you are good to go.
If you add multilingual to your site and didn't translate all your content for other languages, recover your site from the site history or translate all content immediately.
Also, if you are someone with no technical background about SEO, visit our "Ultimate Wix SEO Guide".
Hidden pages on the site
A site page or the entire site might have been get hidden from the search engines like Google and it is no longer listed. Check page SEO settings and site SEO settings on dashboard to make sure you haven't disabled indexing for any page.
You can switch site indexing from the SEO settings on dashboard.
Hover over on "Website"
Hover over on "SEO"
Click on SEO settings
You can control page indexing page by page for all static pages and apps (excluding multilingual settings).
Deleted or removed pages
If you delete a page from your site, the URL will eventually be removed from Google's index.
Likewise, if you delete a product, the URL of the product page will eventually be removed from Google's index.
Pages that cannot be reached by the search engine can be viewed in the Google Search Console menu, under the Scope heading. Here, after making the necessary corrections, it will make your work easier for you to confirm that there is no problem with the pages.
Permission granted pages
Password-protected pages or pages that can only be accessed by members of your site are not indexed by Google.
You can change who can access to your site on page permission settings.
Pages lack of content
Pages that do not have enough content may give a "Soft 404" or "no index" error. Pages that contain no content can be completely removed from the Google index.
To avoid this problem, we recommend adding at least 250-400 words to each of your site pages and making sure to resubmit the page for index on Google Search Console.
Not-indexed pages
If a page you published long time ago is still not indexed by Google, try to check:
If there is a canonical page
If there is a duplicate content
If the page is missing title tags
If the page content doesn't link to any internal or external page
If plagiarism or AI-written content is detected
Out-of-date sitemap
Submitting your sitemap makes it easier for Google to find all pages on your site and can increase Google's crawling and indexing speed.
We recommend submitting your sitemap every time you publish a new change to your site. To learn how, visit our guide "How to Submit a Wix Sitemap to Google".
Further Studies for Wix Indexing Issue
We'll be sharing the results of indexing issues once Google validates all fixing requests, and update this article to enhance our real life experience with Wix SEO.
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