The Official Wix Blog

Why Isn’t My Site Listed In Google?

Posted by The Wix Team | August 30th 2009

Search engine crawlers will index your new Wix website, but it may take them anywhere from 1 month to 3 months.

Three months is a long time. Here’s some information on your Wix website’s indexing process and what you can do to help.

Can Google Index My Flash Website?

There’s been a lot of discussion on whether the search engines can actually crawl and read Flash websites. As of today, at least Google and Yahoo are able to index texts compiled into SWF and any HTML automatically generated by Flash. Even though SWF itself isn’t particularly searchable, any content (texts) inside a SWF can still be visible and indexed easily using the right techniques.

In short, don’t despair – your Wix can and will definitely be indexed. Wix was designed especially to suit Google and the other search engines. Also, we are always developing Wix to remain on the cutting edge with SEO updates from Google and different online sources.

Just look at the picture below. Wix’ website is created using the Wix editor, and there it is ranked right at the top of the first page. Try a few other relevant keywords and see what happens.

Now let’s approach other tactics.

1. Make Sure You’ve Checked the Settings Boxes

First of all, make sure you’ve checked the ‘List in Search Engines’ box in Settings menu. If you haven’t done so thus far, visit the editor and do it.

2. Titles, Descriptions and Keywords

Make sure to update titles, descriptions and keywords in Settings > Site Optimization.

The title and description appear in search engine results so even though you can’t see the description on your site, it is one of the most important marketing elements, both in terms of the search engines and towards generating traffic.

A good title: should include your website’s name, and be up to about 10 words long (70 characters).

A description: should include relevant keywords and be about 30-35 words long (or up to 190 characters).

Keywords: Add about 5-7 keywords. Make sure to use keywords that are relevant and actually appear in your general content. Use as many of your keywords as possible in your description, title and headers to strengthen their relevancy. For more information on your website’s Settings check out Wixpedia.

3. Words, Words, Words

Make sure you have enough good and relevant content. Textual content is Google’s bread and butter. You need to have at least 400 words on your Home Page and 250 words on each of your website’s other pages. If you don’t already have that, start thinking creatively on what kind of written content you can add and where to place it. Also keep in mind that Google (and the other search engines) like relevant sites. It’s not a great mystery that if your site is a business website, it may be slightly confusing if you give it an Arts and Crafts title. Your keywords and texts should be organic, relevant and natural.

If you really don’t want text on your page you can add it as a small footer at the bottom of the page for example.

4. The Chain of Links

Get as many incoming links as you can onto your web page! Google finds new sites through incoming links. As it crawls a familiar site, it follows links from that site to other websites. If you don’t have any incoming links to your website, it just won’t be discovered. Wix automatically creates two links for you when you a build a website using one of Wix’s templates. One is from the directory and one from an XML site map. This helps Google crawl your site but there are many other things which you can do. If you’re having trouble finding someone to send links your way (and you don’t have another website that’s already indexed for example), try link exchanges. People are always grateful when you send traffic their way, and let’s face it; nobody is going to stay in your website forever. So you might as well make friends. Add the links organically into the text. For example, if I want you to read more about Flash website templates, I’ll anchor the link into the text.

5. Get Quality Links

Get good, quality links. Google crawls an average site once a month. On the other hand, it crawls the big sites, such as Digg, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia every day, so if you add an incoming link to your website from your Facebook account, you raise the chances that your website will be indexed fast.

6. Submit Your URL to Major Search Engines

Submit your website directly to the major search engines. Once you’ve done that and read our previous blog about texts and how Google loves them, try submitting your URL to Google . This may make the process a little faster. Submit your website to the other major directories: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask etc.

7. Connecting Your Domain

Index your new domain to Google. If you plan on upgrading your Wix account to use your own domain, we highly recommend you do so before submitting the original freebie account. The reason being, that when you index the Wix URL, it takes Google about a month to index it. Once you connect and submit your new domain, the entire process begins from scratch, thus taking double the time it would to submit the final URL from the start.

To dig deeper into the world of SEO, visit Google Webmasters.

Tagged with: Google . SEO