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Anonymous
November 8, 2012
Question

How to force topics to be ranked higher in Search?

  • November 8, 2012
  • 1 reply
  • 1602 views

I am using RH9. I have read the articles about how Search results are ranked:

In order, it is based on the search word appearing in:

  • The topic title (as in Topic Properties and not to be confused with the Topic Heading)
  • The topic keywords (Increasing the frequency of a word as a keyword will not help as it will be considered only once.)
  • The topic headings in descending order so the word appearing in H1 will take precedence over the word appearing in H2
  • The body of the topic. Each occurrence of a word in topic is summed to calculate overall weighting of a word in a topic.

However this does not seem to be the case for me. I have a topic called "Supported Chart Types" that I would like ranked 1st when searching on "chart". However, it is ranked 22nd despite the fact that the word "chart" appears in the topic title and 18 times in the body (and is a keyword). The #1 ranked topic for this search term is "chart layer" which has the term appearing once in the topic title and only 6 times in the body (and has no keywords). Does anyone know why this is happening? Does anyone know how we can influence the ranking so that topics we decide are more important rank at the top?

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    1 reply

    Captiv8r
    Captiv8r
    Legend
    November 9, 2012

    Hi there

    Seems to me that when I also add the desired search term to the Keywords field of  the Topic Properties, that topic ranks higher in the search.

    Cheers... Rick

    RoboColum_n_
    RoboColum_n_
    Legend
    November 9, 2012

    I thought index keywords also affect the ranking.

    Captiv8r
    Captiv8r
    Legend
    November 9, 2012

    Thanks Colum

    Forgot to mention that. Indeed you would also want to ensure you include an Index keyword pointing to the desired topic.

    Another way to increase rank and stack the deck to favor a specific topic would be to have some hidden text in the topic formatted as Heading 1. Heading 1 terms are assigned more weight than basic text or lower headings.

    The bottom line is that this is somewhat of a "Black Art" and there are many different ways to manipulate the data to achieve specific outcomes.

    Cheers... Rick

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