this tool maybe?

more information can also be found in this post

But not sure how accurate would any data be that you may find from any of these tools if you do not have access to the site itself

People often pick on the hashbangs by default without even testing it for 30 seconds. And i just cannot see why they do this, making an automated fool of themselves.

Wix has an escaped_fragment version of your page which it serves to search engines and as far as our testing and use of it has gone, it works JUST FINE, in fact quite well compared to so many other options out there. Google does see and index every single page and sub-page you create in their html5, and so does bing.

Anyone who says wix is bad for SEO because of hashbang situation is just picking on the wrong reason to base that suggestion on.

But if you asked me, I would tell you that wix CURRENTLY is still not 100% SEO-okayed.

CURRENTLY missing features that severely diminish wix's value when it comes to SEO:

1. Full metatag management is not there, minimalistic controls give, too many unexplained limits and restrictions imposed for character limits and type of characters allowed for urls, titles, meta desriptions, meta keywords, etc.

2. 301 redirects are a fantasy here so far, change a page url and all SEO value created is gonner, as if you deleted it and created a new one. or wix has not really explained this point at all what happens when you alter your deeplink url from within wix after it has been established and ranked, does it work a magic 301, nada so far on this front. Whatever it is, as of now, it is on paper or in trial somewhere in their worldwide network of offices and operatives.

3. canonical tag control is not for user to decide. Wix has stated in other posts (go down the comments) that it might fix this and 301 situation in order of priority... now that is a whole topic in and of itself... i never get their order of priority anyway

4. no SEO friendly and solid blog solution, flimsy and backward workarounds.

aside from these, I personally see NO real reason to avoid wix solely based on its SEO performance.

I am making an example mention of another few fellows whom i know use wix on the other side of the pond so to speak, Brown Owl Interactive. their homepage gets a page authority of 40 which is pretty dam good for a small company in existence for under 1 year and it has a domain authority of 28 which is not impressive, but still ok. After all, in some niche markets, we have clients with solid 50+ FIRST spot rankings on google who for the longest time (years and years) did not achieve anything better than these before we took over them, and still maintained their position without much gimmick.

So, if you plan on sticking with wix for the long haul or forseeable future and if you are not looking for anything too crazy (read DA of 60 and above) for your SEO (obviously if you have the money, you should consider all your options and do a SWOT analysis of which to use)

Moving into wix system from an existing and well ranked website: BAD MOVE AT THE MOMENT, you lose everything.

starting out in wix and deciding on other options later: doubt this is a problem so long as you can keep a record of all your old wix deep links for 301 redirects.

Having said all of this, I personally find that wix works quite well for SEO, requires ABSOLUTELY NO CODING (get rid of that dev you can never find who charges you on retainer... no offense to devs, some bad apples) which allows for things coming together so much faster than your typical custom built equivalence. I must also add, NO WORDPRESS template or website will ever be as customizable or as sick-designable as wix is.

I must add that wix does seem to know what they are doing when it comes to SEO and SE handling of their end, its just that SEO options are still so limited, even after html5 platform improved it significantly over flash.

one last pointer: we still have a client on a wix flash site and I can assure you those sites also get seen by Google without any penalty or issue, quite nicely. and this particular client owns a few rankings of their choice within top 3 of their various markets.

NOTE: seomoz and OSE crawlers and other third party systems generally are not equal to google and while i can personally assure you from experience that you are safe with the big G, I can tell you that you will get crippled reporting and analysis delivered by seomoz and OSE due to the wix SEO approach. so if you need solid reporting, wix may really be a bad option, unless you can create your own custom reports using various sources of info, including what is available from seomoz.

edit: most posts you find out there about wix are usually outdated or fully opinion-based biased posts. So take what you read about wix on 3rd party platforms with a grain of salt, I work with it daily and I can guarantee what I see and say about wix.

You are talking about a custom 404 page or something else?

obviously, a 404 page is something you need to care for at a different level and either fix the page and url that is giving the 404 to browser or totally remove depending on existing value.

If you are talking about custom 404 page, i think you really need concern yourself with its ranking or anything of the sorts as it is just an error page designed nicely, and in fact it must work as if "page was not found/generic browser 404 error" was displayed.

Here's Google's take at it

That is GREAT news!

However, a note on canonicals to clarify our issue with existing no-control system: we have no use for them on search engines or SERPs really, they are purely used as landing pages for paid ads liek adwords and/or other planned campaigns like social media targeted for demographics or localities, they will more than likely be considered duplicate content by search engines like google. we do not wish these pages to rank organically at all for anything. However, we need them not to count against us in our SEO efforts or in ranking the main version of our content (non-targeted, not used for ads, want it to rank, with very similar content striped of any such geo or demo info, canonical tagged from all those other duplicate content landing pages)

This is VERY VERY crucial if you have a business website that operates in more than one geographic location or has two distinct and fully different market demographics to target which will require separate landing pages, however, no matter how we go about it, we are wary that despite our best efforts these landing pages may be considered duplicate as the data on them can only be slightly changed anyway.

That is why I think it will incredibly reassuring to have control over this thing and be able to manually or in some other way set those pages canonical tags properly to the main generic version which is intended for organic ranking.

I quote from the same page you posted,

Q: Do the pages have to be identical?
A: No, but they should be similar. Slight differences are fine.

precisely why we worry what Google considers "slight" difference. it is as usual very vague and hard to define or bet on, so we would love to be able to play it safe.

I really do hope you guys can find an easy way for your team to implement these two crucial seo features... As a marketing company specializing in web, we are tired of wix only being touted as good for photographers, fashion designers, or newbies with 5 pages of static content! In fact we KNOW it is quite the contrary... Wix imho is an Israeli masterpiece, a showcase of a super genius idea and steadfast development and investment behind it, an invention of the century still quite a secret among webmasters... We have been testing and working and searching it for the past 3 years now. I can confirm we have been able to reduce cost to our clients SIGNIFICANTLY using wix and other 3rd party integrations possible with it, and we have been able to deliver major wix e-commerce sites that used to take 3-6 months dev time in 3-4 languages by a team of pro coders, and $20,000-$50,000 in cost, literally for a fraction of that price and within weeks instead. However, we are a bit stuck with these SEO issues and a couple of other features and issues... including SSL which are not as big a deal as all of our checkouts and forms are SSL anyway, but it just gives a better feel to client to see that https on certain pages, although embedded forms all have seals and are all SSL or TLS based on various uses....

So to sum up, I cannot wait until you guys announce availability of 301 & canonical controls for wix users...

First off, may I say a GIANT THANK YOU for this very sudden and active responsiveness! for a minute that silence was scaring us... but this is VERY ENCOURAGING! and I appreciate your private clarifications for our clients website.

We're good on bing, we tested it again and it was a mistake on our part for unpublished meta information. you are correct, BING DOES SEE WIX HTML5

I see, good move then for 404s, i hadn't actually encountered one since long time ago when on flash, where the giant wix logo would pop up... but that is fixed, i just tested it with html5 and am satisfied with the end result. no more need for a custom 404 as bad as before, this we can live with

301s are really an issue for some of our websties as we are in love with html5 platform and would really like to convert them properly, with the 301s giving the existing page authority and backlink juice to the new exact equals, not the new homepage. reason for this: specific purpose and local-only landing pages and content.

Google may get 404 on the seo version. this is VERY CONCERNING!!!! what good is a 301 redirect if google gets a 404 instead... i mean i know users will be forwarded, but google can never see where that page went... and there goes all the ranking and authority down the drain.

On canonicals: we will be needing this as we WILL have duplicate content on various landing pages designed for different localities and ad campaigns with otherwise super similar content. it is very important for us not get in trouble for this and be able to manually tag only one of those pages as the main source and canonical the others to that page. these campaigns will include adwords, and many many social media activities and you can see why we will probably benefit from having different versions as landing pages designated for each area or purpose.

I must say, if canonicals and 301s are somehow brought under users control [either directly via wix platform, or somehow using a form or a special page on wix-much like the flash to html5 converter... but plz not as broken ;)] our worries for wix seo will pretty much be dead!!!! and we have a ton of website clients we have not risked approaching yet as we had to clarify all of this solidly with wix before we could offer them SEO services or consulting on wix sites.

However, I must say, that all this is making wix suddenly so much more appealing to me as the SEO specialist of our small firm. I had very little way before to confirm or even get answers for any of this as you know those forums take a few tries before a non-robot shoots something worthy back and its very tiring and frustrating for those of us who know a little more than the avg user. I have perhaps asked all of this before over there and have gotten no answers comparable to yours here, not really even close!!!! YOU ARE DOING GREAT SO FAR

Once this is all set and done, I will personally update some of those threads and linking them back to this page, this page is already ranking very well for "wix seomoz" and I'm sure a ton of people who really need trusted and accurate data, do search for this term.... Maybe i can even write a blog post for youmoz explaining all of our findings and experience, as well as confirmed responses from you guys. would love to actually do that once all is set and done! You know what, its actually on my to do list as of now, being worked on and its final version will be pending final clarification on above remaining issues.

Thanks again and waiting to hear back!

@wixseo

Thank you for this very precise explanation.

I can confirm also that pages are being indexed correctly in google. but please read below.

So can i just ask that you or someone in the know from community  to clarify for me here, why is it that despite the fact that all pages are canonical tagged back to homepage, howcome when i target for a specific keyphrase without using quotes or anything on google, it is able to pull up a correct subpage of an html5 website and display that as a stand alone result?

I thought based on what i had read and learned, that when a page is canonical tagged for another, it no longer ranks for the term searched that is on it, and instead it will make the other page rank for it instead.

I understand Matt Cutts said in his canonical explanation video that Google reserves the right to ignore canonical tags if its user or webdev is shooting himself in the foot with it and am wondering have i gotten this whole canonical tag thing wrong all this time or is this something that google has pulled or something else and i cannot find a better place to ask this and have it cleared.

also, 301 redirects are a big missing must from our SEO CP for one very obvious reason, a wix flash site and domain being changed to a wix html5 site, will lose all of its link and page juice gained before and basically has to start over and not only that but all old links will be 404d and broken...

speaking of 404s, wix seo team ought to know how useful custom 404s are.... compared to what we show users now which is totally generic and does not cut it for finding the right thing or even retaining one bit of bouncers....

on these two separate notes and basically feature requests, i would like to thank you again for your thorough and clear response and am awaiting your further clarification WIX SEO

Thank you

ps. I do have proof for my claims above from an html5 wix site that i built a while back and i can confirm all pages on escaped fragment version point back to homepage and main domain, yet certain keyword searches bring about different and specific pages of this website into  the SERPs. btw this only happens in google, bing cannot see any sub-pages for this website and will not even return the result that google does for a "phrase search" if you need to see them, i can send you a private message as i do not want client name and domain or anything related to them to be crawled and ranked for in here..... matter of fact, bing cannot even see any text on this site's homepage to show underneath the result. it only sees the main domain and title. which is kind of sad as little of a search player as they may be. its being forced to ignore a slice of search market due to wix's current limitations. but i am not complaining about that as i can personally care less for my own clients and sites as google is enough of a river with plenty ol fish. was just pointing it out since i do have a connection live to wix seo on a very relevant and now deep topic in the perfect seo spot in the world.... so maybe that can also get some love

wix has been incredibly cold-shouldery about this whole thing... very canned responses everywhere, no legitimate explanation of why this happens, and why they cannot find a better way to do it, not even a tat on "we're working on this to increase web admin's options for 301s or canonicals. i can assure you they are not hard to code into a platform like wix, all they need to give users is a little control panel much like they have introduced for pages on html5 where you can set separate metadata, etc. with buttons and modes for 301s and canonicals.

it is also my pure guess-based on my understanding of how google handles these canonical tags, and since wix does not want to clear the air- that there is a lazy reason at wix for this situation-to answer my own question this way:

Google has stated that they reserve the right to IGNORE canonical tags when they so feel like based on their understanding of the websites- ie if they see webdev is shooting themselves in the foot with canonicals, they can ignore it and treat that particular page stand-alone.

FOR THIS, I can see how wix could have gotten a little lazy with this and said to themselves, we just set all pages to canonical tag homepage instead, and whenever google sees a page worthy of standalone ranking and treatment, it does so on its own terms.

which would nonetheless be a terrible and uber lackluster approach to a delicate matter such as SEO & CRO, especially for small business clients who cannot afford a $20,000 custom coded e-commerce page.

a good 80% of all you need for SEO is there, missing are minute controls over individual page canonical tags, 301 redirects, and a proper blog- which can btw be remedied atm with a paid wordpress hookup supposedly.

WIX, we need CLEAR answers.

we also need you to clear this across the board

here is just one of the probably many threads on your forum relating to the specifically mentioned topics above. PLEASE RESPOND & ELABORATE

To wix SEO team

I just got off the phone with your wonderful phone support staff and still have somethings i need to address here.

first and foremost, I think seomoz is not wix html5 (not flash) friendly or vice versa, and that wix  is rather google friendly. these are my experiences as described below - see questions too to see what i mean.

in google, i have managed to get wix flash sites high rankings (currently a few webpages -master pages- are ranking in top 3 for their keywords. so i cant realy approve of the notion that wix flash is not seo friendly, because i have seen it in action and it is rather seo friendly. he who says nay, does not know the site well enough and has had inadequate experience using it.

and its been OVER a year since we ran those pages and we've only seen everything go up with regards to seo. there are tricks and tips you need to know though to make sure you rank well (h1 and title tags, etc)

However, when it comes to SEO for wix html5 websites, i still have a few things I need to clarify with both seomoz and wix staff's help

1. I would like to know more about how and why seomoz system sees/shows only 1 page (and when there are multiple non-sub page, main webpages visible through wix editor) for wix html5 websites (this is not an issue with multiple master pages with flash, they are seen properly).this has been tested on multiple html5 based wix sites now, both hooked and connected to GA accounts as well and both show only 1 page, the root domain homepage with 1 rel canonical tag from the page to itself. both of these websites have more than a few separate webpages that ought to function independently at least when it comes to being indexed or crawled.

with regards to this problem, there rises another issue that remains vague to me: I know google indexes all text and image content on html5 sites as i have ran site:domain.com keyword test and it sees them. however in seomoz, i only see a bunch of dashes in front of all my keywords for html5 sites (these are not optimized at all and are rather new domains so rankings are very low naturally) and i cannot verify or tell whether they are being seen and are not in top 50 results or they cant be read or seen by seomoz bot and crawler. google sees all of them and shows the correct internal url page result when you do a site search test. just want to confirm that seomoz can also see them

2. on wix flash, why are rel canonical tags to the root domain from every single separate master page changing up and down from seomoz's point of crawl? I mean, i have not made any changes to the site in question in 3 months and my number of rel canonical tags have gone up AND down constantly without ANY edits being made to the site in the same time period of 2+ months,

3. why can't we get sitelinks the same nice way that we can get with wix flash sites in your html5, this is a big deal.

and finally i have an open question to seomoz and wix staff both:

why or why not is it a good/bad idea to have all of your webpages rel canonical tag the homepage and transfer all seo points gained and attributes to the main domain. i am lead to believe that this is what wix does automatically across both flash and html5 platforms, at least this is what seomoz seems to be reporting.

in the end i would like to thank all of you wonderful and helpful people at both companies in advance and would like to mention that we are looking forward to using both companies services in conjunction with one another to build nice and cheap websites for our clients and also be able to optimize them well and be able to show and report on all of those efforts properly (what is currently crippled due to issue #1 above). particularly using the html5 site builder. I am sure there are swaths similar minded people like me albeit in the dark and in silence who are wishing they could use the new html5 sites with seomoz the same way flash ones work. i hope there will be more compatibility among the two and good constructive answers to my questions and challenges above.

if you dont mind,

what was your need for doing this

and

what was your workaround

im interested to know here

BUMP! 2013