Question regarding search indexing.

[FredW]

Hello ShopSite folks,

Can you confirm something for me regarding ShopSite's search indexing?

Based on reading your help pages, it appears that content in the page fields: text 1, text 2 and text 3 (and meta description) are not indexed and hence the content does not show up in search results. Is this true? And if so, is there any way to get that content indexed?

If we want the user to be able to search for specific words in the page content is there any way to get this done in ShopSite without going to custom work?

Thanks in advance,
FredW

[Jim]

The ShopSite search is for Products it does not index any content on the pages themselves, after all you are trying to sell products not page content. So if there are specific key words you want indexed to find a particular product it should be in one of the fields that you specify to index. Preferences > Search Settings > Search Indexing is where you configure which of the product fields will be indexed and the priority given to each field.

There are third party search engines that will index all content on your site. I believe Google has something that you can hook into and Bing and Yahoo probably do also. But that would require some customization on your own.

The Search engines will all index the entire content of your site, so if your site is ranked high enough by search engines then just doing a web search will lead to your pages.

[FredW]

Jim,

Thanks for your reply. You did clarify for me how ShopSite indexing works. That is helpful.

I agree our goal is to sell products and can see why you (ShopSite) thinks that product information is the only place to search for keywords.

However, I don't necessarily agree. We have almost 10,000 products and 5000 pages and sometimes even we need to search our site for content that is on pages, not in products. We use our own site for an information resource. I can also see our customers search content to find general information instead of specific product information. I rather keep them on our site searching than have to go to Google to search the whole web for content we have. Content does help drive visitors to products and to sales.

We will look at using alternative methods to supplement ShopSite's search features, like we do today or using Google search.

Again, I thank you for the information.
Regards,
FredW