This post is a practical response to questions many of you have been sending in. Wix offers an upgrade that allows you to direct the Wix website to your own domain. Once you upgrade to premium you must direct your website to your new domain. To find out how you can connect your own domain (URL) with the Wix Flash website visit our support. It may take up to 3 days before your new domain is updated by your domain registrar.  Once it is updated and running, you must get it indexed and ranked. You do this using the same techniques as the ones used for your free website. But what happens to the old free website?

Many will notice that there may be a short period when both websites are indexed until slowly the free website loses its position and disappears from the search engine rankings. Until now, when a Wix user upgraded his/her website, his free domain was automatically removed from the Wix.com xml sitemap. Once the Google bot re-crawls the sitemap it removes the missing website from its listings, as it no longer has any link pointing at it (assuming you’ve removed other links to that URL yourself).

Recently Wix has been implementing a few changes to speed this process and prevent overlaps between the two websites.

To improve this process and make sure it takes place faster, Wix is now also adding a no-index tag to all free websites that have been upgraded. This means that once the Google bot visits the website it will encounter this no-index tag and remove the website from the listings.

Of course, this doesn’t happen immediately. In order for the website’s listings to change, Google must crawl the website. The time frame of this process varies, and can take anywhere from a week or two to two months.

Meanwhile, there are many steps you can take to optimize your new website and get it ranked higher and better. Getting as many websites as possible to point at your website (link) is one thing. Another is submitting your website to Google directly.

Good Luck.