Hi Samantha,

What you have is what are called "canonical issues." By allowing multiple versions of your domain open and crawlable to search engines you "split" your ranking authority and result in the issues you are seeing right now.

The best practice is to choose one version of your domain as the "true canonical" and then 301 redirect the others at the server level by means of mod_rewrite code. Doing so will consolidate your content, incoming links and PageRank and greatly increase the root domain authority of your site.

To search engines, if your site hasn't instituted 301 redirect commands at the server level, all of these versions of your site home page would be treated as "separate pages" and each would accumulate authority individually:

http://yoursite.com/
http://www.yoursite.com/
http://yoursite.com/index.php
http://www.yoursite.com/index.php
https://yoursite.com
https://www.yoursite.com

You get the idea.

Most websites are run on one of three different types of servers...

• Unix-based servers running Apache.
• Unix-based servers running Nginx.
• Microsoft Windows-based servers running IIS or similar.

If you're unsure of what kind of server runs your site, ask your hosting company. Most sites are run on Unix-based servers with Apache. In that case, the server's behavior is configured using something called the .htaccess file.

If your site's root domain already contains a .htaccess file, you can simply scroll to the end of whatever code is already there and append your 301 redirect code at the bottom of the file, starting on a new line. While this may sound complicated, it's actually very, very simple to do. If you can upload files to and from your Web server, then chances are you'll have no trouble managing (i.e. altering or creating and uploading) your .htaccess file(s).

But yes, bottom line, you ALWAYS want to consolidate URLs and present one uniform "preferred" URL format to search engines and users. In your case, that would appear to the be the non-www domain which has the higher Domain Authority.

You can learn all about redirection best practices at the Moz resource here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

The short answer is: Yes...but not "as" bad as previously. Should you choose it over Wordpress as an example? No, you should not.

Here's the long answer and an update of sorts:

The fixes...

• Wix uses "hashbangs" in their URL structure, which previously kept Google from indexing all the content but they fixed this in 2016.
• Wix previously suffered from an inability to customize page titles and add alt tags but it is my understanding that they've fixed these issues as well. And, Google's John Mueller says that Wix Websites do-in-fact "work fine" in search.

Regardless, in spite of the fixes, Wix still has what I feel are issues that render it inferior to WordPress. For instance;

• you can't customize canonical tags (or even add self-facing ones)
• you can't customize product URLs (relatively weak on all ecommerce stuff)
• you can't add customized Meta Description to product pages
• you also can't customize Page Titles for product pages
• Wix has a mobile editor, but that's just for smartphones, not tablets.

I find Wix especially unsuitable for use in ecommerce. Wix pulls SEO information for page titles, descriptions, etc. from the Product Information you initially enter and which cannot be edited at a later time. For me, that's probably the biggest reason that I prefer WordPress over Wix. You make a mistake, you are SCREWED down the road.

Bottom Line: If you can get the client to move to Wordpress, do it. It's just "better."

Hope that's helpful.

It's an issue in that it's not correct.

A "header tag" is always text based. They are used to determine, to search engines, what a page is about. The search engines can't really "see" images in the traditional sense so this application is incorrect.

A lot of designers mistakenly wrap the logo in a H1 tag and call it a day. I call it out in audits all the time. It's just not correct or the best practice. It will have no effect for SEO or for image optimization in that format.

Your goal is always to communicate to users (and Google) what the page is about. The proper application of H1 tags is part of that process.

How new is the online retail store you are working with? I ask because what you have described is VERY common with new sites. It's normal to see indexed URL fluctuation counts, even large fluctuation counts, occur in the first few months of a site as Google works to index the URLs "appropriately."

It's also worth noting that in a post-Panda world Google has really TIGHTENED UP what they choose to index. If a majority of these URLs lack unique compelling content, are just aggregated content from other sources, or suffer duplicate content issues, that will certainly impact Google's decision to include them accordingly.

Unfortunately, what YOU value as good content doesn't matter much if Google doesn't share that opinion. I'd strongly recommend you review the pages that Google is NOT indexing and note similarities. Most likely, all your pages aren't "worthy" of current indexing by Google and as it slowly shifts down deeper into your pages it's making the determination as to which of your pages deserve listing consideration and which do not.

As to how to combat this...work to create QUALITY content that sets you specifically apart from your retail competitors. Make sure as well to REMOVE any questionable or thin content. This type of content can bring down an entire domain post-Panda.

Sorry I don't have better advice. Good luck with your retail site this holiday season!

Hey Chris, it looks like you got some responses to this over on the Google Help Thread.

This is an interesting question. My understanding is that you should include all relevant XHTML, image, and video elements within their corresponding <url>tag all within the XML sitemap itself</url>.

This is discussed a little bit over at Allotment Digital and they even include an example XML file that shows the best practice writeup.

Let me know if that's helpful or if you get any further clarification over on the Google thread.