Problem

The ranking of the results for most queries are not in the correct order. How can I change the order of my results for website search?

Solution

  1. Take a note of your website’s URLs and see how they are structured. For example,

    1. dir1 (directory level 1, the content after the first slash) is a category type, such as abc.com/blog/article-1, and abc.com/press-release/post-1

    2. each domain is a different category type, such as shop.website.com or blog.website.com

  2. Take a look at the Crawler rules section of the console. You can add rules to boost content based on specific rules. By default, the boost value is set to 0, and you can choose to boost records by -50% and +50% value.

  3. You can also add exclude rules from the Crawler rules section if you find some pages that are not required (e.g. example.com/admin).

  4. Rules based on URL structure are most common and easiest way to tweak the ranking of the search results, and you can have your entire site re-ranked in minutes. An example of such rule is Boost results by 20% if dir1 = “news“

Also note that Search.io is a self-learning engine that optimizes each search based on how your users interact with results. This means your results, and subsequent click-through rates, will improve automatically with time.

If result sets aren't what you would expect, you may want to look at your content as well. Does it match the language of your users? Could you improve page titles, descriptions, or body content? Have you overlooked canonical or no-index tags that may have excluded key pages from results?

We generally find it more useful to do a thorough content audit before setting boost or exclude rules.