JSON Page Template Content/Text & Search

[Jason_Davies]

Hello fellow developers!

We've been developing a new theme for a client that has a lot of pages and text content and we decided to start using the JSON page templates and giving them more a page builder to make things easier for them going forward design wise. What I just realized is that the JSON page content does not get returned in the search results.

I can see with the old system that this would make sense, but we plan on using a lot of different custom templates for about 50% of the site pages. That means a lot of keywords for search results are stored the page JSON files.

Does anyone know a way around this issue? Can we expand the search to include the page JSON? Or is there a way of auto inputting the JSON into the page or as a meta field or something searchable?

I feel like this might become a fairly common problem now that Shopify is expanding their page templates to be so much more flexible. Maybe it’s something they want to look at adding to the section files? Like a searchable variable for input fields.

Thanks!

[PaulNewton]

It's still convoluted afaik;

Given the upper limits of how many JSON templates you can have and blocks quota you may just be better off duplicating that content into pages/or in resource descriptions(products) that are either a listing of related things, or you code to do redirects but without knowing the specifics of what your doing XYproblem.

For product descriptions I'd check if commented out html gets in search results or not if so use that method otherwise you'll want to be careful to avoid duplicate content or anything that would seem like invisible keyword stuffing to search engine crawlers.

This was an issue noted by partners from the start not sure if shopify treats it as a known issue or non issue for the same reason metafields aren't included as first class in SER's :shrug:

If your in the partner slack a search of the history from the last unite to some months later might get a hit of some of those talks.

I think I was in a couple of those conversations as "@PN"  with other partners and it was also broached with some search app/service/vendors as well but I don't think anything came of it with shopify or third party solutions. I vaguely recall thinking of some nasty hack using unreleased translation features or something like that but I'd have to dig deep for that. 

Unless other conversations have surfaced some hack the best course is to first shortlist and bulk email search vendors/apps to see if they have this capability and if so pay for the privilege's if this is critical info that must be in search results.

   Otherwise same as above but find a search app that will use metafields and plunk everything into metafields , or metafield definitions and use dynamic sources.