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The site I help to administer appears very poorly in Google search results. While trying to tackle the issue from several angles I've tried to open the site in Lynx browser (the intention was to see what Google robots see):

$> lynx lizavoronina.com

Whoa! All I've managed to see is "Loading" that never ended. When opening the site in normal web browser the site looks as it should.

  1. Is that nearly true that Lynx sees what Google bots see?
  2. How can I start looking for a reason that only "Loading" is displayed?
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  • There are 712 results returned for your domain in Google - so you are certainly indexed. However, there are a lot of duplicate titles and descriptions showing in the SERPs which could explain why you might not be ranking well for for your target keywords.
    – MrWhite
    Dec 28 '13 at 18:18
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Try using wc3html validator for your site. I did a quick peek and found 8 errors in your code.

wc3 validator

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  • Thanks for the handy tool. Those were mostly complaints about the tags of the form <tag/> (as opposed to <tag></tag>). One more error is about the unclosed <link> tag. Those are good points to take care about, but those quirks are pretty common and usually browsers are tolerant to them. How those errors can cause Lynx to consider the page incompletely loaded?
    – BreakPhreak
    Dec 28 '13 at 12:42
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    Lynx is a text based browser and I'm not seeing alot text to show. By looking at the source, lynx stops loading after this: <div id="viewer_preloader"> <p>Loading</p> <h2></h2> <div id="preloader"></div> </div> <script type="text/javascript" src="static.wix.com/services/core/2.694.3/javascript/core/utils/…> <script type="text/javascript" src="static.wix.com/services/web/2.694.3/javascript/wysiwyg/viewer/…>. So in other words, lynx lacks in javascript support
    – betro
    Dec 28 '13 at 13:08
  • If you want to see what google crawls from your site, just enter these to google.com's searchfield: site:lizavoronina.com
    – betro
    Dec 28 '13 at 13:13
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This site uses JavaScript. Disable JS in your browser and you’ll see that the only (visible) content in body is:

<div id="viewer_preloader">
 <p>Loading</p>
 <h2></h2>
 <div id="preloader"></div>
</div>

A comment in the homepage’s source says:

<!--
IMPORTANT! LOOKING FOR THIS SITE’S SEO CONTENT?

This site's SEO content, such as meta tags and headers, is not here.
This is because search engines, like Google, actually crawl the site's homepage via http://www.lizavoronina.com/?_escaped_fragment_=.

Internal pages, like “?????”, also have their own special search engine versions, for example: http://www.lizavoronina.com/?_escaped_fragment_=about1%2Fc1fz3
If you’re looking for this site’s SEO content, that’s where you can view it.

Want more information about Ajax page crawling? Read Google's explanation here: http://bit.ly/ajaxcrawling
-->

So those search engines that support the ?_escaped_fragment_= alternative (for example, Google) will be able to access the content.

Users without enabled JavaScript, and search engines without JS/Ajax/?_escaped_fragment_= support will not see the content.

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  • Exciting! However, when opening http://www.lizavoronina.com/?_escaped_fragment_=. I see 404 Page Not Found. Looks kinda Wix-related issue, right?
    – BreakPhreak
    Dec 28 '13 at 20:55
  • @BreakPhreak: It works for me (I get a 200, not 404).
    – unor
    Dec 28 '13 at 21:34
  • Something went wrong... The page you tried to access does not exist on our server. For now, you may want to visit our site's homepage. This is what I get when opening the URL in Chrome. Strange. Thanks for the answer, I'll try to find out why I see that text.
    – BreakPhreak
    Dec 29 '13 at 7:08
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    @BreakPhreak: Ah, you are probably entering a trailing dot. The URL is http://www.lizavoronina.com/?_escaped_fragment_=. The dot in the "SEO comment" is for ending the sentence and not part of the URL.
    – unor
    Dec 29 '13 at 11:17

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