Search Engine Question

What do you output?

[madcat]

Hey-

I set up a fdse search engine, it works fine but I'm wondering if the output should be this way. Where it gives the ordered list:

1. is the title description...
URL: Where to find this info...

Lastly I have excerpt, but it produces non-sensical jibbirish (If you put in 'contact' in the box) you get:

Excerpt: design design clients clients contact contact map map search work small...

My question is should the output be this way?

Where 1. is the title text, then the URL --> And what should the excerpt be popping out?

Thanks for any insight- I'll continue to read the manual as well, however, the default they explain is not how most have their output configured.

[ppg]

hmm. thats odd. Perhaps its picking up links?

Have you put in your meta description tag in your pages? That what fdse picks up on my companies site - works a treat, and you also get to see what google will show searchers in its description.

[brotherhood of LAN]

RE Meta Description

Madcat, any chance you're letting the spider loose on the web? I found that quite a few people seem to get their meta description and keyword tags mixed up, or think they can spam the description tag etc etc.......and this can reflect when using FDSE over scale.

If you go to User Interface > Somewhere down the bottom, there is a "line listing" line or something similar down the bottom that shows what each SERP in FDSE displays i.e. meta description etc, maybe you might want to check that.

FDSE is fairly simple, I'd put money on it just being a poor meta description.

[madcat]

any chance you're letting the spider loose on the web? I found that quite a few people seem to get their meta description and keyword tags mixed up, or think they can spam the description tag

No, everything is correct as far as description and keywords...not sure what you mean by the first comment about the spider;) but I'll go and check FDSE.

I am probably using poor meta tags (I have lots to learn) but spam? no.

Thanks for your replies.

[ppg]

you want something like this for your meta description:

<meta name="description" content="A really nice, short, clear description of this page which will tempt people to click on the link">

The text in the second set of inverted commas is what fdse will show your users.

hope this helps.

[madcat]

The excerpt is what is causing the problem, it must be indexing links on the page, but how? If you type in contact in the search utility within the profile you can see it.

M

[mack]

Under general settings it allows you to set weights for the title , page text description etc...if you put to much weight on page text it will not display the description properly.

Hope this helps!

[madcat]

It sure does, I took it out for sake of sanity but will want to get it right eventually.

Thanks,

Madcat

[mack]

When using fdse I always feel it is best to start of with a totaly standard install and tweak it one item at a time. that way if things go pair shaped you can always undo the last thing you altered. FDSE has literaly loads of settings that you can play about with but if you play with them all at the one time it can get messy.

[madcat]

Cool. I just set it up where the first output item is the title, the second is the description information and last is just the URL of the page.

Simple, and will work for now- I'll get into it a bit more now that it's set up.