Site Areas allow you to curate search results by increasing or decreasing the importance of certain site areas by URL patterns, as well as exclude content.

Boosting Ranking with Site Areas

For example, you can decide to boost your product pages higher in the search results and lower the importance of your press releases.
The default ranking is 100%. To boost, select a weight higher than 100%. To reduce ranking, choose a weight under 100%.

  1. Log in to the AddSearch Dashboard
  2. Go to Site areas
  3. Click Add new url +
  4. Choose Contains or Regular Expression from the dropdown menu
    • When the Contains option is selected you can type in a pattern and all URLs containing the pattern apply to the Site area rules
    • When the Regular expression option is selected all URLs matching your regular expression apply to the Site area rules
    • You can set a Site area rule that boosts or excludes the matching URLs (see below)
  5. Input the pattern or regular expression you want to match to the input field
  6. Choose the weight from the drop-down menu on the right of the input field
  7. Click Save to submit changes

Picture of Site areas weights.

The Site area weights are applied in real-time after they are saved.

Examples:

To boost all pages in the search results that reside in /products/, you can select Contains from the drop-down menu, input /products/ into the input field, and select a weight higher than 100%, say 150%. Conversely, if you want to reduce the importance of an area, select a weight under 100%.

To lower the importance of all URLs that end with pdf (all PDF files) to 50%, you can select Regular expression from the drop-down menu, input .*pdf$ to the input field and select a weight of 50% from the weights drop-down on the right of the input field.

Please note that these patterns will be matched against URLs in the order they are listed. Arrange the list so that the highest priority patterns are on the top and don’t put generic URL paths above specific ones.

Site area weights are wildcards by default. Site areas can be defined with regular expressions with a regex: prefix. For example, regex:.*contact-us$ would match all the URLs ending with contact-us.

This feature has been designed so that there’s as little maintenance as possible for you as the site owner. When creating new content, you don’t need to worry about how it’ll appear in the search; once you’ve decided your weight rules, you’re all set.

Excluding content with Site Areas

You can exclude an entire site section or a single page using Site areas by following the instructions:

  1. Log in to the AddSearch Dashboard
  2. Go to Site areas
  3. Click Add new url +
  4. Choose Contains or Regular Expression from the dropdown menu
    • When the Contains option is selected you can type in a pattern and all URLs containing the pattern apply to the Site area rules
    • When the Regular expression option is selected all URLs matching your regular expression apply to the Site area rules
    • You can set a Site area rule that boosts or excludes the matching URLs (see above)
  5. Input the pattern or regular expression you want to match to the input field
  6. Choose Excluded from the drop-down menu on the right of the input field
  7. Click Save to submit changes

Picture of site areas exclusion rules.

Please note that exclusions require a recrawl. If you want to update the index after you have created the Site areas rules you can start a full recrawl or a recrawl for individual URLs the Dashboard’s Index tools page.

For more information visit our documentation on exclusions.

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