The Official Wix Blog

Saving Multiple Versions of Your Wix Website

When you conduct a search online, Google and the other search engines try to show you a variety of relevant web pages. Search engines filter through duplicate content, to provide users with pages with distinct information. This contributes to a positive search engine user experience.

However, sometimes the natural process of editing involves creating duplicate content. Say you want to update your Wix flash website, but you don’t want to save the changes on the Published version until you’re positive you like them. Instead of making changes to your original document, a way around this is to go to “File”, and click “Save As”. This creates a duplicate version of your original document. You can now experiment and make changes to your site’s content without permanently altering your earlier work.

But how will Google (and the other search engines) know which version of your website to index?

You must decide which version of your site you want indexed.

First, go into the Settings of your preferred version.  Under Site Optimization, make sure the “Searchable” box is checked. If it isn’t, check it. Click OK and Save.

Then, go into the Settings of your duplicate Wix versions.  Uncheck the “Searchable” box. Click ‘OK’ and Save your Wix.

What Google Sees

To see what Googlebot currently has stored in its memory of your site, type cache:yoursite.com into a search. Or, type your Wix’s URL into a search, and under the search results click on the Cached link rather than your site’s Title. You can see the date and time that your site was last crawled. If nothing comes up, your site has not yet been indexed by Google.

If you do not clarify which site you want indexed and which site you want kept private, Googlebot will interpret the most recent version of your site as duplicate content. Older links have more time to build SEO juice and are therefore favored by search engines. Googlebot will then revert to your older web document, and this is what users will see when they search for your website.

Getting Your Site Re-Indexed

Once you uncheck the “List in Search Engines” box in the site you DON’T want indexed, you won’t see the changes in a search right away.  It can take Google 1-3 months to “unindex” a page. In the meantime, there are a couple of things you can do to speed up the process:

• Get good backlinks to your website
• Submit your site to Google again

Saving multiple versions of your site with Wix’s free website builder can be a smart editing tactic. Just make sure you’re in control of what can and cannot be indexed by search engines. Happy editing!