How to optimise search results without using tagging

  • Resolved amn_wordpress

    (@amn_wordpress)


    9 years, 8 months ago

    We have the need to optimise page ranking in search results, without using tags.

    For example, there are several pages with word1 word2 in the title and content.

    Some of these pages are very long (Detailed pages), and so word1 and word2 are repeated many times.

    One of these pages is shorter (Summary page), but is the page that we want to appear first in the search results when searching for “word1 word2”, as this has the best information for this search term.

    The problem is that word1 and word2 appears fewer times in the Summary page compared to the Detailed pages.

    In all these pages “word1 word2” appears in the Title. We have upweighted Title, so all these pages appear at the top of the results. However, the Detailed pages appear first.

    First question:
    If no tags or comments are in place, is the ranking of search results based on the number of times the search words appear within the content? (That seems to be the case, but just want to confirm).

    Second question:
    Is there any way of optimising a shorter page content, to allow it to appear higher in the search rankings than longer pages with the same search terms appearing more frequently?

    We need to identify if there is a way of optimising the content itself that will allow shorter content to override longer content in search results.

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/relevanssi/

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author Mikko Saari

    (@msaari)

    9 years, 8 months ago

    For your first question, yes, Relevanssi is using the standard tf * idf weighting, where tf is the term frequency (= how many times term appears in post) and idf is inverse document frequency (= how rarely the term appears in the whole database).

    As it is, Relevanssi will find posts with more words better than the posts with fewer words.

    Is there an easy way to tell which pages are detailed pages and which are summary pages? Relevanssi offers you lots of control over the way the posts are weighted, and if you can tell which posts you want to boost, it is simple to write a function that will either boost the weight of certain pages, or rearrange the order of the search results.

    Depending on your approach, you’ll want to use either relevanssi_match to adjust the weights or relevanssi_hits_filter to reorder the results.

    Thread Starter amn_wordpress

    (@amn_wordpress)

    9 years, 7 months ago

    Thank you Mikko, that is very helpful.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • The topic ‘How to optimise search results without using tagging’ is closed to new replies.