Page Rankings
What are Page Rankings?
A page ranking allows you to pin results at the top of the list for specified search terms. Using specific search terms and/or an audience, it is possible to manually select particular results to be shown above the organic list of results. Page Rankings are engine specific.
Example
When a visitor searches for search terms like “Job” or “Career”, you can configure a page ranking to always display the page about open positions as the first result on the page, even if the page content may not seem the best match to the search engine from a logical standpoint.
How to set up a Page Ranking
Page rankings allow for manual pinning of results based on specified search terms.
- In the navigation, select Tools › Page rankings
- Ensure the correct engine is selected in the dropdown at the top of the screen
- Click the New button at the top of the table
- Give the page ranking a name in the Name field
- Enter a search term to activate this page ranking. Type enter or click the plus icon to add the search term
- Next to Ranked pages, click the Add pages… button
- Search for the page to add by title or URL
- Click the plus icon for the page to add it
- Repeat to add more than one page to the page ranking
- Click the Save button
- Optional: Next to Excluded pages, click the Add pages… button
- Search for the page to exclude from the results by title or URL
- Click the plus icon for the page to add it
- Repeat to add more than one page to the page ranking
- Click the Save button
- Optional: Select a target audience for the page ranking. Requires the audience feature
- Click the Save button
Best practice for page rankings
Page rankings allow manual pinning of the most important results for specified search terms. Before configuring page rankings, there are certain things to consider. Since the page rankings are manually maintained, they will not change until a MyCludo user manually changes the configuration. If the need for the page ranking is expected to change over time, it is recommended to plan when the reconfiguration should happen. If this is not done, there is a risk of the page ranking being forgotten and continuing to show outdated results to the visitors.
Example
On a telecom site, a page ranking is set up to manually place the newest model of a phone as the top result when users search for a certain brand or phone name. Once a newer model of the phone is launched, it is important to reconfigure the ranking to reflect this. Otherwise, it will continue to show the now outdated phone as the top result.
Alternatively, another feature like Boostings can be used to dynamically promote new phones over older phones.
No matter what changes may happen to the pages and their content over time, a page ranking will continue to show the defined pages, until a the configuration is updated.
Keep in mind that any results that are otherwise triggered by the search term(s) added to a page ranking will naturally display below the ranked pages.
When to set up a page ranking
The rule of thumb is to always keep your visitors in mind when working with tools that impact the ranking of your results. That especially goes for page rankings, since page rankings are on the top of the hierarchy when the engine determines the order of results. So, when should you set up a page ranking?
When you have a strong anticipation of what results are most important for your visitors for certain search terms
Example
During covid, a municipality would have a large number of pages on this matter, ranging from news articles to informative content. A page ranking could be set up to ensure that the page about test center locations would always be on top.
When you notice search terms with poor interaction in your analytics, especially ineffective searches
Example
Ineffective searches are evident of search terms producing irrelevant result. By adding a page ranking for an ineffective search term, you ensure the most important result(s) appear first, thereby increasing the CTR (click-through-rate) for the search term in question.
We always recommend keeping an eye on analytics when interacting with a tool like page rankings to make sure you’re meeting your users’ expectations.
Using special syntax to cover abbreviations or patterns
Instead of spending time entering – and possibly forgetting about – all the variations of a word (abbreviations), make things easier for yourself by relying on special syntax to do the job. Special syntax can also be used to cover certain patterns, like a product ID.
Special syntax and usage
| Asterisk (*) | Also known as a wildcard. Will match any alphanumeric string of any length. Examples: ‘*bike*‘ would match any search term including “bike”, thereby covering everything from “mountain bike” to “bike path” or simply “bikes”. ‘health*‘ would match search terms like “healthcare” or “healthy eating” but not “everyday health”, because the asterisk is only placed at the end of the term “health”. |
| Pound (#) | Will match numbers. Each ‘#’ symbol is equivalent of one number. Example: Products have a product ID, always consisting of 10 numbers in a row. A page ranking activated by ‘##########‘ would trigger every time a product ID is entered, for example, if you would always like the product overview page to appear first when a product ID is entered. |
| Question mark (?) | Will match alphanumeric characters, meaning both numbers and letters. Each ‘?’ symbol represents a number or letter. Example: Continuing from the example above, let’s pretend product IDs consist of two letters and 6 numbers. Then, you could set up the page ranking to be triggered by ‘??######‘. It is never recommended to only use the ‘?’ symbol for a page ranking. If you had a page ranking for 8 question marks, ‘????????‘, this would trigger all search results that contain an 8-letter word. |
Handling broken Page Rankings
The listed pages in a page ranking are checked against the current index of the corresponding engine. Thus, if a ranked page does not exist in the corresponding index, it will be detected as broken. When a page ranking is detected as broken, a red exclamation mark will appear in the page rankings overview as well as in the page ranking itself.
Assessing broken page rankings
- If the URL in the page ranking has been updated or changed recently, remove the current URL from the page ranking and add the new one
- If the URL is leading to a page that no longer exists, remove it from the page ranking
- If you are unsure whether the URL is in your index, you can check it in the Page Inventory tool
- If you think the URL should be in your index and are having trouble finding a solution, don’t hesitate to reach out to support
Cludo supports detection of broken page rankings. This article covers how to handle these.