Wix | Live Webinar: How to Get Indexed in 2024

Okay, so thank you so much, Mordy, for your help there.

We're going to be chatting today with the incredible, the fantastic, the amazing Fabrice Cannell, who is the principal product manager from Microsoft Bing. We are so pleased to have you here. Thank you for joining us today, Fabrice.

You're welcome. Thank you.

And Fabrice is joining us all the way from Microsoft HQ on the west coast of the United States. So thank you very much for joining.

And we are just going to go through a couple of housekeeping slides. My name is Crystal Carter. I am the head of SEO Communications here at wix. And we are joined by Morty my,

my co host, my tech support, my partner in crime slideshare extraordinaire who is sharing, sharing these, these slides as well.

And Morty's going to be going to be going through the questions. We've had lots of questions today, so a couple of housekeeping things. First of all, yes, this webinar is being recorded. You will get a YouTube link to this recording later on and, and you will be able to also see the slides later on as well. You are now familiar with the chat and you are also maybe seen the webinar Q and A down at the bottom next, right next to the chat there. Please feel free to ask questions there. We have folks answering questions there as well. So do check that out. And also be, please be aware this is our first webinar of 2023, but it is the first of many. There will be lot, lots. We're really pleased to have Fabrice this, this time, but we'll have some more fantastic guests coming throughout the year. So that's great. In terms of agenda, we've done the introductions, we've done the housekeeping.

Morty might also give us, give us a little shout out for the SEO Plug, SEO or the SEO Hub, as he always does before we get going.

And we will have Fabrice give us some information on IndexNow and indexing in 2024 and then I'm going to answer a few questions about, about indexing and, and, and WIX and some of the tools that we have there for you. And then we're also going to get into some other additional questions. I think lots of people have added in questions for the, for the Ask an Expert and we're going to, we're going to pull in a few of those and also some questions questions from

the Q and A.

So with that, Morty, was there any

parting, parting words you'd like to add before we get going?

No, I just want to Remind everybody to check out the WIX SEO hub where you can check out our podcast, serps up, our newsletter, Searchlight and Crystals Baby, our brand new SEO resource center. You get downloadable checklist, cheat sheets, toolkits and templates under the new resource center. So check those out.

Fantastic, fantastic elements galore.

So with that we're going to stop sharing our screen and Fabrice, we are going to hand it over to your incredible, capable hands.

Yeah. Thank you, Kristen. Let me share my screen. We'll do this here. Okay. Can you see? Yep. Great. So today we'll do a few minutes to tell you a little bit about an extnu in the context of AI and SEO, obviously. And so first of all, I've got the privilege of working on search at Microsoft for the last 26 years, a very, very long time. And as a search veteran, my mission is really to create the world best index. And we measure that in term of comprehensiveness, freshness, richness. In short, I am downloading the Internet every day and if you relevant website, if your good quality website is missing from the big annex, I failed. So what you see is really this Internet copy where we have to do the copy in house within Bing of the Internet to power kind of a blue links of Bing. But you should not forget that this day this kind of platform we are having is also powering Bing shot Bing, copilot, advertising, everything. So what you should care is having nxing right, make advertising successful, make chat and copilot successful, make multimedia successful. We used to say that SEO is dead. It's not true. SEO is on steroids this day. By having a good indexing pipeline, be able to get the relevant content index, make all of everything at Bing another search engine successful. So next is I will briefly tell you a little bit of what matter in this AI era and what really matter is that as you can modify the content and to adjust to your customer needs and to adjust also to your competitors on SEO, you should really make sure to have the ability to index your content in a real time fashion. You should not wait for search engine to catch up with your content. You should order the search engine to get your content in. Second is that you should continue to focus on your customer and you should try learn, repeat, repeat, repeat over and over to find the best way as SEO experts to get your content indexed, to get your content to try new things and to get your content ideally at top position. So the key is really to stop cold guessing. This is what's happening with search engine over the last kind of 30 years you have a website like this beautiful WIX website and you have search engine and a crawler here. And what search crawler is doing is really pinging the website once a while to see if there is a change down on the website and then maybe there is a new links somewhere on the page. And so we are coming again to see did you change any new links or simply to verify if a link is still valid, is still up, are you dead link type of things. And I want to share that it's kind of the old century technology and now you have the ability to do far better than that. And this is all about stop cold guessing and taking control of a color to ensure high quality index in search engine not only at Bing but also elsewhere. So what we did search engine came together to offer an index node API enabling you to really ping the search engine to notify the search engine. Hey, please come to visit me. Basically the caller is coming to pick up the latest change on your on your website and reflecting this content change within the engine an API, you ping it Hey, I change the color is coming. And again this content is reflected in the search engine. So indexnow this is a new protocol. This is two years old protocol. And what we see is we see a rapid expansion of this protocol every day more than 60 million websites are publishing on the IndexNow API corresponding to 1.4 billion URL. And this is corresponding to 12% of clicks at Bing in new content NX at bing and so 12% of the links are already powered by NXNOW. So many search engines have adopted more are coming especially in 2024 you will see that far more search engines are adopting an EXNO because we do believe that this is a good technology to really change the game to go away from this crawler, I guess thing to release something that is telling certain genes what change. So NXNO start to be supported by content management system more in the future. We have plugins available or you have a simple API that you are called if unfortunately you are not on content management system at wix so encouraging you to adopt content management system that are really stellar for SEO such as wix that has index no integrated or else you have to pay the price of installing a plugin and if you're on your own, you can call the API to get your content nx. This is just a small overview of we are collaborating with content management system to have them adopting AnnexNow and again things will move in 2024 to have more of the whole ecosystem adopting NXNO There is also a lot of top eBay, LinkedIn and others that have adopting NXNO. We will communicate a little bit over the following weeks to show you that really the whole industry is moving toward adopting IndexNow. So IndexNow help for faster indexing. It help in terms of authority making sure that your latest content that you really care is indexed in search engine. If you publish something in general you have made on a new press release a typo, something you really want to get this content index in search engine. You really don't want to go having nightmares, sleeping bad. Because when search engine will be aware and come to pick up this content, this has to stop. You want to go to sleep and having a good night and you want this content to be indexed in search engines. Obviously you care about relevance to be able to retrieve the best quality content. And so having the content index obviously will trigger that. This is making this is important for search engine especially when you are competing with other websites. Let's take the example of news content. If you are not number one in general, you have very little chance to be number one because the first one will cabin az. We attract all the clicks, links, everything. And so Kirilli Nom b first matter and then this is also helping search engine to lower the crawl cost because by having the stellar signal we are little by little if we want to move faster. But we are to really minimize the call of other techniques. We have to discover if your content has changed on the site. So again, why index node? This is to take control of your SEO game with real time indexing. This is very, very important to adopt IndexNow. You have a protocol website that is indexnow.org please visit it or you have bing.com indexnow or simply you have to use WIX Premium and WIX Premium is doing everything for you. So that's my presentation. This was just an overview of IndexNow how this is working and the value for for the customer. And I give you the back the presentation.

Thank you so much Fabrice. So if people aren't aware, IndexNow is something that was. That has been around for a while and it was recently introduced to WIX in this autumn and and we've seen a lot of great, great uptake on that. Fabrice, can you tell us this index now is something you've been working on, you've been working on since the beginning?

Yes, yes, we we spoke to a lot of search engine to come together to solve a real problem. This is this problem again of knowing what changed on the Internet in terms of added, updated or deleted content and the next no is solution real time, an open solution where you notify one search engine, you notify all search engine, helping the whole industry to get aware of what's happening on the Internet and notif and minimize coload on plenty of websites.

Exactly. So I think that for people who aren't familiar with this, this means essentially that, that for WIX users who have Index now and for other folks who are using NDAX now, as soon as

you publish something, the Index now does the work.

In traditional, traditional crawling, you, you as in as an SEO would have to do, would have to do a lot of, a lot of that legwork. But with Index now, it tells, tells the tells, it tells the search engines what's, what's going on. And I think this is something that will become more, more important and as

the web evolves in this sort of new AI era and things. Morty, I can see you want to jump in on that.

I just want to chime in really quick to address some of the questions and the comments. If you're using WIX Premium, it's built in, it's native, as Fabrice mentioned, you don't have to do anything. WIX does it for you. So we're telling Bing, hey, this page is either new or this page made a change to their content. Come and check it out and crawl it or crawl it again if it's a old page that made a revision.

Yes. And I think, I think that with that, I think maybe we can jump into a little bit of that on some of the Q&As that I've got. There are some of the FAQs that we get a lot here.

Thank you so much.

So the first one, the first one is for some people who might be new to some of these concepts and

for anybody who's fully aware of these and don't worry too much to the next one.

So what's the difference between indexing and ranking? This is a question that as an SEO, I get asked a lot.

Fabrice, I'm sure that, you know, folks ask this to you a lot as well.

The way I like to describe it is. So there's kinds of, you know, Fabrice covered this as well. But when we think about crawling and indexing and ranking, crawling, if you think about it like a record making a platinum record, becoming like a hit record or something, crawling is essentially like the DJ listening to the record, finding the

record or finding the stream. I'm saying record. I'm dating myself but finding, finding the music online or wherever listening to it

is like, is like indexing, right? Okay. This is something that I know exists, right.

I figured out that it exists.

And then ranking says, okay, this is, this is so good that this is now top 40. Now you can, you can be, you

can be crawled and not indexed, right? So somebody might hear the latest Taylor Swift song, but they might not, might

not want to add it to their playlist, right? But you can't be the top song on the charts if you've never been indexed, right? So you have to get played, crawled,

you have to get listened to a lot. So index and then you have to get ranked.

So these are the processes. So if you go to the next

slide for me there, Morty, thank you so much.

So, yeah, indexing is a process of collecting and storing information from the web. Search engines find indexable pages after they

are crawled or submitted via index now

and ranking is when. And the next one there when search engines order the pages in, in their index according to the relevance for certain keywords, queries, features, etc. So when you're thinking about, some people say, oh, you know, how, how come I'm indexed but I'm not ranking? Well, sometimes you will, you'll rank for some things and you won't rank for other things. And some things, sometimes not every page will be, will be ranked, pages will get indexed and sometimes they, they ebb and flow. So the index will grow, will shrink and certain features will be emphasized and things like that. Which is why when we talk to people about ways you can be indexed, one of the things that's really important to think about is increasing the kinds of media that you have to reflect the kinds of media that you see across the serp. For instance. So if you're seeing that there's lots of images for the kind of content that you're making, it makes sense to add images to your content. If you're seeing that there's some video, it makes sense to add video. And so there's things like that to think about. And there's other elements of the SERP features that you might want to consider as well. For instance, if you're on wix, you also get something called structured data for a lot of important types of SERP features onto the next one. Okay, so another one, how can I see which pages are indexed?

This is also another question that we get asked regularly.

And there's essentially four ones that are, that are. Go to. You can use SEO tools to help you see this a little Bit as well. But one of the things we use is search modifiers, which I'll explain what that means. The wix site inspection tool, which if you're a WIX user, is built into your WIX SEO tools and is a fantastic resource. You can also check your webmaster tools, which, which WIX is connected to, and you can also check dedicated feeds. So we go to the next one. So search modifiers, these are kind of like cheat codes

for search engines.

So if you go to Bing or another search engine and you type in site colon and then the name of your website, your domain name, then it will pull up, if you go to the next slide, it will pull up something like this. So you will essentially only get the ones that that search engine has for your, for your URL or for your domain. Um, and it'll tell you essentially the number of results and then it will also tell you which pages that it has that it has indexed. Um, if you have no tools available

to you, um, if you have, if

you have a low amount of, you know, tech like let's say you're just on a mobile and you don't necessarily have your full laptop set up, this is a great way to just give it, get a quick sort of bird's eye view of which pages are, are on there. It's also useful for checking if you have recently, if you've recently migrated a website and you want to make sure that the, that the domains are the right ones, then this is also a useful one to check. So you can check on your domain and you can see which ones are the ones that the search engine are seeing. Fabrice talked about some of the lag that happens with search engines in a sort of traditional crawling. And one of the things that IndexNow is trying to do is trying to sort of reduce that lag. So sometimes when you migrate a site or even when you launch a site, there can be a bit of a delay with which pages will come through. And so, so it's worth checking this. So if you just launched a site, you might want to check this straight away and then maybe check it a couple of days later and then, and then maybe check it a few days later after that to sort of see, see how the progress is going. You should see if you've got good internal linking throughout your site. You should see these, this number increase. And also if you have the right

pages being indexed, because not every page needs to be indexed. If we go downstairs.

Okay, so the next tool is the WIX site inspection tool. If you Go into SEO Tools and then go down to site inspection. You can see some great tool. You can see this tool here. Morty has a great write up on the WIX SEO Learning Hub all about how to use this. It comes, it has a video as well which shows you step by step how to, how to use this and which things work with it. And essentially what you can do is once you are connected to, connected to the have completed the WIX SEO Setup checklist, then you can use this and you can run this through through Google Search Engine to see which pages are being indexed on there. And it will give you lots of information about which pages are indexed. So there you see valid warning, invalid unspecified and that's telling you status, the status update of whether or not the pages are valid on the search engine. Which means that they're recognizing them in terms of status they're talking about. URL is known to Google, submitted and indexed, crawled, discovered, indexed and not, and submitted and not submitted in sitemaps. It will tell you lots of different elements about it and then they talk about different things about visibility. So you know, mobile visibility, other other issues around things around schema markup and things like that. So this one's a great tool. The other thing that's worth worth looking at is your Webmaster tools. So within the WIX Setup SEO Setup checklist you have the ability to connect to Google. I'll talk to you about that a little bit later. But, but that also makes it really easy to connect to Bing. And if you are taking your SEO seriously, I highly recommend that you connect to Bing's Webmaster tools because they have a fantastic, they have a fantastic set of tools available to you and they're completely free. So this is, this is a great place to, to look at your indexing and if you go to the Index now section, then if you have a WIX website, then you can see that, that the sources show as wix. So which means that every time you're uploading a new page it will, it will show you when it was last submitted and so it will show you when the site was published and when, when it was submitted to to Bing via via indexnow. So you can see whether or not something was submitted today, whether it was submitted, you know, yesterday, that sort of thing. So this is a great place, a great resource for you and there's an, there's a couple of other resources here as well. So the other thing that you can see in the Bing Webmaster tools is if you go to Site Explorer, you can Search by, you can filter by indexed URLs and then you can see exactly how many pages on your website are being indexed. You can see their impressions, you can see lots more information there. And they can break, they break down which ones are there as well. If you're trying to figure out which pages are most important for indexing, it's worth looking at that list to make sure that only the pages you want are there. One of the most common things we see, and I've seen other folks talk about this as well, is pages that

shouldn't be indexed being indexed.

So things like, things like if you, for instance, on wix, if you create a shop on wix, there will be a few sample pages there.

Make sure that those are not indexed when you go live. Another thing that happens a lot is

that people will have staging pages. And I see this really, really common, not just on wix websites, on lots of other websites as well. But people will have staging pages and they have, you know, people in the

team that don't actually exist or they'll have like, oh, this is a, you know, hello world or Laura Mipsom and all that stuff. Those pages is smiling as well. You've seen this too. So those pages should not be live on your website. They should not be indexed.

So just make sure that, that any pages that are live on your site are the actual pages that are, you're ready to launch and that you're ready to have indexed. I think that when people worry about indexing trouble, so people say, oh my pages aren't being indexed. Make sure you clean up your crawl first, right? So don't waste, don't, don't waste the time that Google's crawlers or index now are spending looking at your website on pages that they don't need to look at. So if they're, they're, they're staging pages, if they are draft pages, if they're pages that aren't ready yet, don't, don't have this indexable. Use your WIX SEO tools. You know, there's a little toggle button. You can say, you know, don't make this page ready for search engines and use those to make sure that you clean up your call. The other thing that's worth worth looking at is within your webmaster tools, for instance, something Webmaster tools, you can see exactly how many pages they've discovered and you could also compare that to how many pages they have discovered via their sitemap. So for instance, you can see here, I can see that my sitemaps and I can see that there's two sitemaps here. I have two different types of sitemaps here. The first one is the blog feed. Every WIX user has a full HTML blog blog feed, RSS feed, which you can also submit to Bing Webmaster Tools and to Google. This is great. It's very similar to Index now in that it pings, you know, lets them know as soon as it updates, as soon as you add to it. And it's really easy for it to crawl and you can use it on lots of different ways. The other one is your sitemap, which is your standard sitemap there and so that you can also submit to there and make sure that you're seeing that. Now what you want to think about is making sure that the number of pages that you have live on your sitemap matches the number of pages that

you want to have live online.

So make sure that that makes sense. And similarly you can see that in Google Search Console as well. And that also gives you lots of information there. And it tells you when your sitemap was last submitted and when it was last read. Now you can see that here. My sitemap was Last submitted on 21 January, but it was last read on 19 December. Now that might mean that I need to resubmit it, but if I haven't changed my content, then the chances are that I don't need to resubmit it. So that's, that's something to think about as well. The other thing to think about is dedicated feeds. So a good example of this is Google Merchant Center. Within your WIX settings and under marketing integrations, you can see the feed for Google Merchant Feed. And this is something that is a dedicated feed specifically for products. And these can help you with indexing specific types of content. So for instance, if you have a shop on Wix or then you will want to use, you will want to use this, this feed and to connect to this. So essentially you click get data feed, you get a little, a little code and then, then you can go into Google Merchant center and you could submit your feed. If you click next there for me. So yes, so there you can see that. I can see that there are 69 different items that are live within Google Merchant Center. And if this matches the number of products that I have live on my site, then that's great. If it does not, then that's something that I need to go through and make sure that those people, those pages are the right pages that they're that they're actually live, that the products are listable and all of that sort of stuff. Okay, so here's a few things, a few tools that WIX has to help you with indexing. So index now Again, this is something that you don't have to do anything. This is something that is built in, it's available for all Premium users automatically and something that will update index now as soon as your page changes. So this will connect you to Microsoft Bing, this will connect you to Yandex, connect you to Yaver or Naver, and it will also connect you to other search engines. And this is something that is, is being used by all of our Oliver Wix users. And you don't have to do anything.

Just enjoy the benefits of this fantastic protocol. Thank you Fabrice for all your fantastic work. And if you'd like to know more about that, we have an article on the WIX SEO hub.

The other thing that's worth looking at, that's a great tool to help you get indexed is the SEO Setup Checklist. I was recently working with an ex or with a WIX user who has had a site for a few years

and she's not completed the WIX SEO set of checklists.

So do spend some time making sure that you have completed this. If you haven't, then it's absolutely worth doing because it has step by step instructions, it's dynamically updated. We update it this, update this constantly. We have, we've added in AI features to this, we've added in keyword research features to this. So if you haven't visited the SEO Setup Checklist recently, please do because it's, because it's worth, it's definitely worth your time and it'll save your progress. So as soon as you complete one thing, you know, if you've got, if you've got to step away and come back, that's fine. It'll save your progress and it will help you move things, move things over as well and also offers recommendations and for not just setting up but ongoing SEO. This is something that the team spend a lot of time on and we highly, highly recommend putting, putting it yourself, setting aside some time to, to work on this. The other thing about this is that you complete the SEO set of checklists. It connects you to Google Search Console and will index your homepage. And after you do this, what you

should do is head over to Bing Webmaster Tools and also submit your website to Bing.

And I say this, and I've said this for, for many years, this is really useful because when you go over to Bing you can submit your website to via Google Search Console with a single click. So once you've, once you've submitted to Google Search Console you, you click import and then that makes your website, that makes your website indexable and submits it to, to, you know, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia, Bing Chat, which is power, which works with ChatGPT and all of, all of that as well. So this is something that's super useful and it will take you about five minutes to do so. It's an absolute win. Further, you know, having a good understanding

of multiple search engines can help you understand exactly how they, how they all work together.

And site verification, okay, so site verification is something that's also really useful. And if you are using Bing then, then let's say. So I was looking at the site today and I wasn't able to connect that one and it said that it wasn't connected. So essential. Essentially what I did was I went to Bing. If you go to the next slide, Morty, and they have a little tag that says, that says copy this tag

and paste it into, into, into wix.

So what you would do is you copy that and we have a section within the WIX SEO tools it says site verification and you can paste that into it and then you click verify and then you're verified. If you were using a different kind of CMS then then you will probably,

you might have to ask your dev, you might have to book a ticket, you might have to do a bunch

of stuff to get this, to get this sorted out. And however, with WIX we make it really simple for you. So you literally copy, copy that little bit of code, paste it in and then you're able to verify your site and get lots more of that data on your, on your page. So the other thing is. Oh, that looks like it needs to refresh. So yeah, the other thing is that the, we have the.

Yeah, that one needs to refresh that slide. Sorry.

Finally I had someone who asked within the, within the section about the WIX SEO tools and within the WIX SEO

tools you'd have to come out of it and go back into it, Morty, if you wanted to. Sorry. Within the WIX SEO tools you have lots of things that help you to,

to, to get going on your, on your SEO. So people are saying how can I use indexing to rank? And if you use the WIX SEO tools it will help you to rank and finally distribution tools. So one of the things that's really important with, with, with SEO and with indexing is to give them, give them lots of signals. So particularly if you have a page that's stubborn to index, one of the things I like to do is to, is to hype it up so you can use different things like, like content distribution tools to help you to show different search, to show different search engines that users are interested in this content. And that can include social signals, that can include email marketing, that can include lots of different elements. So make sure that you're sending relevancy.