Best practice for boostings
Boosting allows for a more custom configuration of how the Cludo search engine ranks the results in a search. Before setting up boostings. it is important to understand the impact of the feature as well as the visitors’ needs when interacting with your search.
Example
It may seem like a good idea to boost all news articles to promote updates and commercial content – but it can cause frustration for a visitor who is looking for documentation, which is now being buried among lower-ranking results.
The need for de- or increasing the ranking of certain results is typically unique for each website. As different types of boostings can be done on either fixed parameters or based on the search term, it is important to look at the specific user needs as well what fields are being crawled and how they can be utilized.
Boosting values range from 0% to 1000%, where anything below 100% will decrease ranking, while a boosting value above 100% will increase the ranking of the affected results. It is always recommended to work with “softer” values to begin with. A boosting of e.g. 800% will heavily impact the underlying algorithm of the search engine and could do more damage than good.
By default a search engine will have a few boostings added, which can be modified if needed:
- Title is boosted by 150%
- Metadescription is boosted by 110%
- Files are boosted by 30%
Boostings are engine-specific. This means that it’s possible to have two engines with the same results showing in different orders due to their boostings.
Examples of boostings for different industries
Education: Increase the boosting for admissions, and decrease the boosting for old newsletters
Financial: Increase the boosting of loan rates pages or informative pages
Government: Increase the boosting of residents and decrease the boosting of documents
Healthcare: Increase the boosting of services and bill payment pages
Legal: Increase boosting for your partners and attorneys, and decrease boosting for press releases
Non-profit: Increase the boosting for donations and memberships pages
Sales/Consulting: Increase the boosting of your products, services, or contact pages
Technology: Increase the boosting of support and sales pages
Ecommerce: Increase the boosting of product pages
It is recommended to test the engine before and after adding boostings to verify the expected behavior in the ranking of the results.
If you need advice on how to adjust your boostings, feel free to reach out to support.