Wix site owners: Is your favicon blank in the search results?

Friend of MHC, Simon Cox, brought a Wix SEO issue to our attention on Twitter this week as to why Wix blocks crawling of favicon.ico across all Wix sites within robots.txt.

What is happening here is that Wix limits the favicon customization feature to premium users only while blocking the crawling of the default Wix icon within robots.txt (which site owners do not have control over).

The file for the default Wix favicon is named favicon.ico:

Here is our site in the mobile SERPs (we are premium members):

By contrast, on a free Wix site, Wix’s favicon will display within the browser, but as it is blocked off to search engines for crawling, the result is that Google’s default globe favicon shows in the SERPs:

Browser tab

Mobile search result

Google rolled out this favicon feature in the mobile search results back in May of 2019. According to Google, their testing showed the favicons within the mobile result “cards” helps to “anchor each result” and allows searchers to “more easily scan the page of results and decide what to explore next.”

As a Wix site owner, your options as it stands currently are to: 1) Live with the dull Google default favicon in the mobile SERPs, or 2) Upgrade to premium to select your own favicon. Even if Wix didn’t block off their favicon for crawling, we don’t think showing the default Wix favicon on your site is a great look anyway if mobile search is important to your site/business!

That said, we do think this is something Wix may want to revisit now that favicons are displaying more often as SERP features. Given their augmented relevance in mobile search in 2019, favicons may be an important enough feature now to offer to all Wix users -- whether they’re premium or not.

Additionally, any crawl-resource concerns on Wix’s part should likely be outweighed by the branding benefit of allowing the default Wix favicon to be crawled and displayed in Google’s results across their millions of sites.

Thanks to Simon for the question!