/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

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.