MotherFluxer Docs

Search engines and link previews for your App ​

A published App is a real page on the open web, so two audiences meet it before they ever click into it: search engines deciding whether to list it, and the messaging apps and social networks that unfurl its link when someone shares it. You control how your App shows up in both.

For your App you set a title, a description and a share image. Those details do two jobs. They tell search engines what your App is about so it can be found and indexed, and they turn a shared link into a rich card — title, description and image — instead of a bare URL.

This applies to your Live App only. Search engines and the crawlers that build link previews read your App's public address, so every setting on this page takes effect once your App is on the web. Your Draft is always told not to be indexed, so your private working copy never turns up in a search result.

Where search lives in the editor ​

How your App appears is decided where it is published, so search sits in Manage › Publish, in the Search container under the Draft and Live cards. Its status says whether your App is Listed, Not listed, or still Unpublished, and how many Live visitors it had this week. Beneath it is your App as a search result shows it: its title, its address and its description. When you have changed something that hasn't been published yet — its search text, or the brand name or tagline it falls back to — it also shows Changes waiting, so you never mistake your Draft's text for what Live shows.

Set your App's title, description and listing ​

On Manage › Publish, press Settings on Search:

  • Title — the headline shown in a search result, at the top of a shared link's card, and in the browser tab. Keep it short and specific. Leave it blank and your App's name from Brand is used, so the tab and the card are never empty.
  • Description — a sentence or two summarizing your App. It appears under the title in search results and inside the shared card. Leave it blank and your App's tagline is used.
  • Listed — whether search engines may list your App. On by default. Turn it off and your App asks search engines not to index it or crawl it.

Press Save. Takes effect says On publish: these settings reach your Live App the next time you publish.

Set your share image ​

The picture that fills the card when your link is shared is not a search setting at all: it is your App's Share image, set once in Develop › Format under Brand, beside your App's name and logo, with a Share image description for people who can't see it. The same picture represents your App everywhere.

Give each page its own title and description ​

Every page of your App is published at its own address, and each can read as itself. Open Manage › Pages, press a page's settings icon, and fill in its Search section: a Title and Description for that page alone. Leave them blank and the page uses your App's own, which the fields show as a hint. Press Save; like the rest, it reaches Live when you publish.

So an App with a home page, an about page and a pricing page shows up in a search result, or a shared link, as three distinct pages. The Other pages card has no search text of its own. The share image is your App's one Share image on every page.

One card per page, not one per screen ​

Inside a single page there is one card. A page that draws its own screens as the visitor moves around shows the same title, description and card on every screen it draws, whichever screen the link opens on. Write that card for the page as a whole.

One thing is out of scope: a unique preview generated for every individual record your App stores — a different card per product in a catalog, or per post in a feed — needs a card built on the fly per address, which is a different concern from the details here.

The automatic default share image ​

You do not have to supply a share image. If you leave your App's Share image unset, MotherFluxer generates a default one for you automatically, so a shared link still shows a proper card instead of a blank space where the image would be.

Setting your own image is worth it when the picture matters — a product shot, a cover graphic, your logo. When it doesn't, the automatic default keeps every shared link looking complete with no extra work.

Being found and indexed ​

Getting a rich card when your link is shared is one half of the story; the other is being found in the first place. MotherFluxer serves the standard files and signals that search engines look for, so your published App can be crawled and listed while Listed is on:

  • A sitemap — a list of the addresses inside your App, so a search engine knows which pages exist and can go and render each one. Every page is listed automatically; your App can also add addresses its pages draw for themselves, so crawlers find those screens too.
  • A robots file — the standard file a search engine checks first to learn which parts of your App it is welcome to crawl.
  • A canonical address — the single official URL for each page, so a search engine knows which address to list even when the page can be reached more than one way.
  • Structured data — a machine-readable description of what your App is, which helps a search engine understand it and can enable richer search results. You get a sensible default without doing anything, and you can declare your own instead.

You don't assemble any of this by hand. You set your title, description and image, and MotherFluxer produces the sitemap, robots file, canonical address and structured data that go with them.

Because these details only take effect on your Live App, the surest way to confirm your card looks right is to test the published link. After you publish (or republish after a change), copy your App's address and paste it into a link-preview or rich-results testing tool — the free checkers offered by the major messaging and social platforms, and by search engines, show you exactly the card and search snippet they'll generate from your page.

If the title, description or image isn't what you expected, adjust the settings, republish, and test again. Crawlers sometimes cache an older version of a card for a while, so if a change doesn't show up immediately, the testing tool's refresh option usually fetches your latest version.