Updated: May 18, 2023
Author: George Nguyen
Knowing whether your pages have been crawled (discovered by Google) or indexed (stored in Google’s index), or whether your structured data markup is valid, for example, can help you fine-tune your online presence and make large leaps in search visibility.
For years, Google has provided this information via Search Console, its platform for measuring search traffic and performance. To make those insights and tools more accessible to all business owners and SEO professionals, Wix now offers an approachable way to monitor and understand your site’s issues and indexing status at scale.
The Wix Site Inspection tool enables you to keep an eye on your site’s technical health, mobile usability, rich result eligibility, and more, without having to pull the data manually or leave the Wix dashboard.
In this article, we’ll discuss:
The Wix Site Inspection tool
Our Site Inspection tool enables you to monitor the status of your pages in Google’s index from within your Wix dashboard. The data within the Site Inspection dashboard (shown below) comes directly from Google via its URL Inspection API.
The Site Inspection tool is organized to show you:
The proportion of your pages that Google has indexed and excluded
The most common status details associated with your pages
An overview of your site’s usability on mobile devices
The index status, status details, mobile usability, and rich results eligibility for each of your URLs
This can be very valuable information because URLs that aren’t indexed aren’t eligible to show in Google’s search results, meaning that your potential clients, customers, and visitors will never discover those pages in Google Search.
How to get started with the Wix Site Inspection tool
To access your Site Inspection dashboard, first, go to your Wix dashboard. In the left-hand navigation panel, click on Marketing & SEO, and then SEO Tools from the dropdown menu. Finally, select Site Inspection.
If this is your first time accessing the Site Inspection tool, then you’ll be prompted to inspect your site (as shown above). Because the data comes from Google, your website must first be published and connected to Google Search Console (GSC). Once you’ve run the inspection, you’ll be taken to the Site Inspection dashboard.
The Site Inspection dashboard at a glance
The top of the Site Inspection dashboard includes a Highlights section that can help you understand your site’s overall health in terms of Google indexing and mobile usability (how well your site pages work on mobile devices).
Let’s take a closer look at each of the three sections that make up your Site Inspection Highlights.
Index status overview
This section tells you how many of your pages Google has indexed or excluded from its index. Pay attention to the number of pages that fall into the various status categories, as they can indicate whether pages have issues or don’t appear in search results, for example.
Indexation statuses include:
Valid — The page is indexed and can appear in search results. (This does not guarantee that it will appear in search results.)
Warning — Google may or may not have indexed this page depending on its specific warning status. This means that the page may not appear in search results.
Invalid — Google did not index this page due to an error on it.
Excluded — Google crawled this page, but decided not to index it.
Unspecified — Google doesn't currently have any information for this page.
As you plan your optimizations based on this information, it’s worth remembering that not all your pages should be available via search engines. “Thank you” pages and gated content, for example, may not provide value to users coming from the search results.
Top status details
The top status details provide additional context for the information in the index status overview (discussed above). Essentially, these are the reasons why pages couldn’t be indexed or haven’t yet been indexed.
Below are explanations of some of the status details you may see:
Submitted and indexed — You submitted the URL and Google has indexed it. It can appear in search results.
URL is unknown to Google — The URL has not yet been found by Google. This may be because it’s a new page or it has no links directing to it.
Crawled - currently not indexed — Google has crawled the page, but decided not to index it for search results at the moment (it may or may not be indexed in the future).
Discovered - currently not indexed — Google found the page, but decided not to crawl it for search results at the moment. This is usually because Google decided that crawling this page would overload your site and rescheduled crawling for a later time.
Indexed, not submitted in sitemap — Google indexed this page, even though it's not included in your site’s sitemap. It can appear in search results.
Mobile usability
This section provides an overview of how well your site pages work on mobile devices. While this does not specifically pertain to indexation, it does relate to mobile-friendliness, which is a Google ranking factor. Additionally, mobile-friendly sites make it easier for users to access content and convert.
Here is an explanation of the details listed in this section:
Valid — The page meets a minimum level for mobile usability and should work well on mobile devices. A page may still have some mobile usability issues even if it displays this status.
Issues — This indicates that a page has issues that will prevent it from working well on mobile devices.
Invalid — Google did not index this page due to an error on it. You may be able to request that Google index the page after you fix the error.
Unspecified — Pages for which Google currently has no information. This may be because Google couldn’t retrieve the page or test its mobile usability at the time of the report.
Within your Full Report section (more on that below), “No data” may also show as the mobile usability status of an individual page. This means that Google has not indexed the page and that it doesn’t have any information about the page’s mobile usability.
Full Report section
While the Highlights section presents information that’s useful for understanding the overall health of your site, the Full Report section provides page-level details, which can help you make specific fixes and optimizations.
In this section, you’ll see:
Page name
Type of page (e.g., Main Page, Blog Post, etc.)
Index status (e.g., Valid, Excluded)
Status details (e.g., Submitted and indexed, Unknown to Google, etc.)
Mobile usability status (e.g., Valid, Invalid, No data)
Rich results eligibility
At the top of the Full Report, there’s a search bar that allows you to search any of the fields within the report. There are also filtering options (shown in the image above) that enable you to view data for pages of a certain type (blog post, main page, product page, etc.), index status, mobile usability status, and/or rich results status. Use the search bar and filters together to quickly look up a page or scan for issues.
You can learn more about an individual page’s status and details by selecting it in the Full Report. Doing so launches the page result information panel (shown below) for the associated page.
Here, you can review more details about a page’s coverage status, mobile usability, and rich results eligibility. The Learn more links direct you to the Site Inspection tool’s Wix Help Center page, where you can dig into specific statuses to correct errors that may be hindering your search visibility or mobile user experience.
Additionally, you can view the URL inspection report within GSC for the associated page by clicking on the Google Search Console link at the bottom of the panel. There, users with owner or full user access can request that Google crawl that particular URL.
Ways to use Site Inspection data
Site Inspection data can act as a portal into how Google sees your site, which is invaluable for troubleshooting and planning your optimizations. Below are a few scenarios where the Site Inspection tool may be particularly helpful.
Identify and troubleshoot content that hasn’t been indexed
The Full Report displays a list of your site’s URLs. You can scan the index status column to quickly identify pages that haven’t been indexed (these pages won’t be eligible to show in Google search results).
For pages that should be indexed, you can reference the status details (coverage) column to learn more about the page’s status. For example, a “Crawled - currently not indexed” status could indicate that Google thinks the content is thin or identical to content on another URL, while the “Unknown to Google” status likely means that Google has yet to discover the content.
Improve your mobile usability
In instances where a page shows an “Invalid” mobile usability status, the mobile usability section of that page’s result information panel may explicitly tell you why. This can enable you to quickly identify the issue and implement a fix.
Our Site Inspection Help Center page includes a detailed section about the various mobile usability statuses. For an even more comprehensive review of a page’s mobile-friendliness, paste the URL into Google's Mobile Friendly test tool.
Verify rich result eligibility
Rich results, which are generated via structured data markup, are search listings that contain information beyond the standard URL, page title, and description. Since they’re visually distinct from traditional results, they may make your listings stand out.
The rich results column of the Full Report may indicate that your rich results are valid, the availability of optional fixes, or that there are issues preventing your rich results from rendering properly.
When an optional fix is shown, the rich result will still render. However, implementing the optional fixes suggested in the page’s result information panel may help you add more information to your rich results.
An “Issues” status indicates that the given page’s structured data is missing one or more required fields and will not render properly. Again, accessing the page result information panel can reveal more actionable details—in the example below, the missing field is explicitly highlighted.
When a rich result is valid, you can open up the page result information panel to view the type of rich result that page is eligible for.
Note: By default, Wix adds preset structured data markups to some of your site’s pages.
Before you get started with the Wix Site Inspection tool
To get the most out of this tool, it’s important to be aware of the requirements and limitations associated with it. When using the Wix Site Inspection tool, keep in mind:
The Site Inspection tool displays information about the most recently indexed version of your site. This may not be the same as the current, live version of your site, as it takes Google time to crawl and index site changes.
Google has a scan limit of 2000 pages per day—if you exceed this limit, you’ll need to wait 24 hours before you can scan your site again.
It may take some time for Google to index changes on your site. If you see issues in the report that you've already addressed, you can ask Google to recrawl your pages.
Evaluate your technical SEO with Wix’s built-in tools
The Site Inspection tool can open up a world of potential optimizations, but even so, there are likely other aspects of your site’s technical health to monitor and improve. For those concerned about Google’s ability to efficiently crawl their sites, Wix’s bot log reports are an excellent place to start.
George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix. He creates content to help users and marketers better understand how search works. He was formerly a search news journalist and is known to speak at the occasional industry event.
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