Removing pages and artificially pushing search results to the top.

[gazchap]

Just got a couple of questions - this is my first implementation of phpDig so I'm pretty new.

1) Is there any way of removing a single page from the index? phpDig indexed our Site Map, and now there is the unfortunate side effect that some searches show the site map first rather than the more relevant pages.

2) Is there any way of artificially pushing a search result to the top of the listing? For example, if a user searches for a certain keyword, the page that is at the top is one that arguably is of no use to most people that would be searching for that word.

I realise I can probably change the content on the pages in question to try and bump them up, but that is not particularly desirable as the content is quite precise.

[bloodjelly]

Hi gazchap -

I had a similar problem with the sitemap on my site. One way to prevent indexing is to add one of these lines in the HEAD section:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

The first prevents indexing, and prevents the spider from following any of the links on the page. The second prevents indexing but allows the spider to follow the links. This applies to all spiders that might visit the page. If you want to target PHPDig specifically, you can use the <!--PhpdigExclude--> tag (see documentation). Don't forget to delete the sitemap page from the index after making these changes.

As for question #2, one way to push the result to the top is to manually go into the database and change the weight of the page/keyword you want. Another, better way would be to use the PhpdigExclude tag on the page you don't want coming up in search results, then reindexing it. This way, Phpdig will favor the other page.

Hope that helps.