A few of you have recently written to Wix Support stating that when you search for your Wix in Google, you see your URL but with /noflashhtml or /sitebackhtml at the end. Instead of pointing to your beautifully crafted Flash website, these links direct visitors to a page stating that Flash must be downloaded. It leaves you wondering “Where did my Wix go?”

/noflashhtml and /sitebackhtml

Both the /noflashhtml and the /sitebackhtml are necessary components of your site. They contribute to the successful presentation and functioning of your design elements and Flash content. It’s the search engines who do not need to see these files. This issue seems to only occur when performing a search with Google. The crawlers of Bing, Yahoo! and the other search engines don’t seem to cache these pages. So, Wix has created a fix preventing Google from crawling these two specific files inside your Wix.

The Fix

We have added a robots.txt, as well as a no-index tag to the source code of all Wix sites. These are like signs telling Googlebot to scram when it encounters the /noflashhtml or /sitebackhtml URLs.

The Caveat

Google is not a person. It is a robot. Robots have limitations. As stated in Google Webmaster Tools:

“Note that because we have to crawl your page in order to see the noindex meta tag, there’s a small chance that Googlebot won’t see and respect the noindex meta tag. If your page is still appearing in results, it’s probably because we haven’t crawled your site since you added the tag.”

So, if you are still seeing those pesky links when you search for your site in Google, it’s probably because your Wix has not been recached since before this fix was implemented. And since Google only displays search results based on the info it obtained from its last visit to your site, the old version of your site may still be inside Googlebot’s memory.

You can check to see when Google last crawled your site by typing “cache:yoursiteURL” into a Google search. In order to refresh this memory and restore your proper Wix URL to Google searches, you need to wait until Google crawls your site again. This may take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.

All Good Things Come to Those Who Backlink

This motto should be burned into the SEO section of your brain. Not only does link building raise the ranking of your site in a list of search results, but it affects how often your site is crawled by all the search engines’ crawlers. It all boils down to how many backlinks you have as well as the quality of those links. The more backlinks you have (links on other websites pointing to your Wix) the quicker Google will come visit you. Then, it will take a new snapshot of your source code, and refresh its index. In all likelihood, as soon as Google spots your site again, the proper URL for your Wix will show up in a search.

Get Re-Crawled:

1. Visit the Yahoo! Site Explorer to see what sites are linking back to you.

Type your URL into the window at the top and click Explore URL

2. Obtain more backlinks to your site

3. Submit your site to Google

Be Patient

We’ve seen plenty of users whose sites were showing the /noflashhtml and /sitebackhtml links in Google, only to be restored to their proper listings once the sites were crawled again. The same will hold true for your site. Follow the suggestions in this post and the related articles on link-building, and restore your Wix to its seat in Google glory.

You should also check out Where Did My Wix Go? – Part 1

This will be useful for those of you who are wondering whether Google has indexed your site, and what it looks like from the crawler’s POV.

The feature I’m talking about is the cache feature.
The technical definition for cache memory is ‘a fast storage buffer in the central processing unit of a computer’. Basically, cache is storage and what this means is that Google stores each website it crawls.

Google takes a snapshot of each of the crawled pages and stores (caches) this version. As you enter a search word, notice that practically every search result offers a regular link and a ‘cached’ link.

Why is this useful?

This is useful in cases of internet congestion (if you are unable to access the current page), if a website is very slow to upload or if the owner is working on the page and subsequently making it unavailable. Remember, when you view a cached web page you are viewing that web page as it appeared during the crawlers last visit. It may be quite different in the present.

Also, when you visit a cached version of a website from the Google search, you will see this page with your keywords highlighted in different colors. This can make it easier for you to find the content you were searching for.

So how does this affect You?

The good news is you can see Google’s stored snapshot of your website. This is a great solution for those of you who are wondering if Google has indexed your Flash website, and how exactly it sees it.

To see a cached version of your website, enter your website’s URL with the word cache: before it in the Google search. For example: cache:http://www.seomywix.com. If your website comes up, this means Google has already indexed it.

Another way to see the cached version of your website is to search for it in Google and choose the ‘cached’ link instead of the regular title link.

You can also download Google’s nifty tool bar, a very useful device in general, and cache the page you’re looking at.

At the top of the cached page is a header reminding you that you may not be viewing the current version of the website. It also gives you the date on which the crawler indexed this page. This is a good way for you to find out when and how often Google’s crawler indexes your website.

One last piece of information on cache. Google will cache the first 101kilobytes of text on your website, so if you have more than that (texts that is), don’t be surprised if you can’t retrieve it in the cached version of your website.