Starting with the FusionBot Bronze Package, you have the capability to "influence" the order in which specific pages or pages from entire directories or domains (see mini-portal feature) are returned within your search results when a visitor conducts a search, using the "Page Ranking" feature.

While FusionBot does a very effective job at returning the most relevant results first, there may be times when you wish to override the default position a specific page, or pages from an entire directory or domain appear in the search results, ensuring that the information you intend to present to your visitors is most highly visible.

Page Ranking allows you to apply a factor to a specific page, entire directory, or entire domain to either increase or decrease its relevancy and corresponding location within the search results. The location for a specific page, pages from an entire directory, or pages from an entire domain can be controlled either in combination with a specific keyword, or any time a page, directory, or entire domain are returned within the search results, regardless of the term searched.

The weight assigned is a factor between +10 and -10, or 'featured'; A weight of +10 will force the page to be the first listed; a weight of 'featured' will force the page to be the first listed, and in addition, apply formatting for highlighting the result (featured match), as controlled via the '.featured' class in the results template; and a weight of -10 will force the page to be the last listed. A weight of +1 will slightly increase the page's positioning whereas a weight of -1 will slightly decrease the page's positioning.

When you desire for a specific page / directory / domain's position to be influenced, regardless of the keyword searched, place an asterisks (*) in the Keyword input box instead of an actual keyword.

NOTE:  When a keyword is entered for influencing the position of a particular page, the keyword MUST exist on the corresponding page in order to have any effect. For example, if you specify a page named 'index.html' with a relevance factor of +10 (forcing the page to appear at the top of your results) when the keyword 'widgets' is searched, if the keyword 'widgets' does not exist anywhere on your 'index.html' page, either in the META tags, or BODY, applying a relevance factor will have no affect.

Also, if you have enabled Word Stemming for your account, rather than having to enter multiple (similar) keywords for influencing the position of a particular document / directory / domain, stemming will be applied to the keywords you have entered in your Page Relevance Form, enabling you to influence the position of your applicable page based on your keyword's stem and all of its derivatives.

For example, WITHOUT stemming enabled for your account, entering the keyword 'spidering' in your Page Relevance form for influencing the position of a document, will ONLY influence a document when your visitor searches for the EXACT keyword, in this case 'spidering'.

However, with stemming enabled, a visitor could search for 'spider', or 'spiders', for example, and even though you only have a single entry for the keyword 'spidering', since the stem of your Page Relevance Keyword is 'spider', the page's position in your search results will still be influenced by the factor applied in your form . This prevents you from having to make multiple entries in your Page Relevance form for each possible keyword derivative that you wish to influence for a specific page / directory / domain.

Similarly, if you have defined a group of synonyms, when entering a keyword for influencing the position of a page in your search results, the SAME weighting factor assigned to the actual keyword entered into the form below will be applied to any of the keywords that are part of the same synonym group as well.

If you have implemented a mini-portal, and desire to influence an entire domain's position within your search results, instead of entering the EXACT url and page name of a page within your index to be influenced, enter the URL of the domain whose position you wish to influence, followed by an asterisk (*), in the Page URL input box (i.e. https://www.somedomain.com/*). The same principle holds true when you wish to influence the position of the entire contents within a particular directory as well, i.e, https://www.yoursite.com/important_directory/*.

To setup / configure specific pages, directories, or domains for ranking, login to your FusionBot Account, click on the Spider tab, select the 'Relevance Controls' option, then click the link labeled Page Relevance Weighting. Additional configuration instructions can be found on this page.

If you wish to modify the default sort option (Date or Rank) for your FusionBot search results, please view the following FAQ. Please note, however, that the Page Ranking feature will only work when your default sort order is set to "Relevance (Rank)"