Ask an SEO about what content management systems they find challenging to work with and almost undoubtedly they will mention WIX. There are many aspects of the WIX CMS that can present SEO challenges that simply do not exist when using other platforms. This article is about a fix I have found for fixing one of those issues – search indexing of blog posts.
We have had a challenging time getting a clients WIX blog posts indexed automatically by Google. Googlebot seems to have no issues indexing and spidering most of the website, but when it comes to the blog section it just can’t seem to do it.
After many emails with WIX support no solution was ever found. Most of the emails just ran us in circles with several responses being general boilerplate responses referring us to an SEO guide. They never successfully helped us to find a solution to this problem and left us scrambling to figure one out. Even with the post URLs listed in the sitemap.xml file they still were not able to be spidered.
One of the solutions we came to for getting a blog post indexed was to visit Google Search Console, using the Inspect URL tool and then the “Request Indexing” button. A manual solution that worked, although it was less than ideal. At least I typically found the page would end up visible in Google within a matter of minutes, but sometimes as long as a day or two – but it always got indexed. Not an elegant solution, but it worked. On October 14, 2020, Google disabled the “request indexing” feature. They expected it to be re-enabled within a few weeks, but as of the writing of this post it has still not been reactivated.
Update, Dec 23, 2020
Today, after a 69 day outage, Google restored the ‘Request Indexing’ feature within the URL Inspection Tool.
It now appears to once again be functioning correctly.
This left us to find another solution to the problem. Manually adding text links to the website outside of the blog worked, and while this is still something that was done for certain posts at certain times, it does not apply to all posts all the time. We needed some automatic way for Google to easily find and index all posts.
The solution? Adding a custom blog feed to a page that does get spidered by Google. In this case a feed was added to the clients home page. Within a day of adding the feed the most recent blog posts were automatically indexed. If you have a WIX site and are experiencing a similar problem you can add a blog feed by clicking the ‘add’ button in the left navigation, selecting blog, and then “Custom Feed”.
Why Does This Happen?
For all other content management systems we have worked with Google has never had issues with following links from the main blog page. So why does it have issues with WIX? I am unsure of the exact reason, but WIX relies heavily on JavaScript and I am confident this is the reason. Even in older versions of ScreamingFrog (a web spidering tool) we were unable to spider those blog posts; however, more recent versions no longer seem to have this problem.
Google has become good at spidering websites that utilize JavaScript, but there is something with the way WIX generates the main blog page that Google seems to have trouble with. Adding a blog feed to their home page; however, does not seem to cause problems for Google.
Again, not the best fix, but one that will work until we (or WIX) figure out how to let Googlebot through the blog page!
Do you have a WIX website? Have you experienced similar indexing issues with the blog or other areas of your site? I would love to hear about your issues and how you solved them! Send me an email to scott@stepforth.com with your story!