What are Boostings?
Despite built-in intelligence in Cludo’s algorithm, you may have a need to prioritize certain areas of your site based on various parameters. Boosting gives you control over exactly that. Boostings allow certain results to be ranked higher or lower when they match certain criteria based on static rules or the search term.
Boostings do not replace the existing logic of the search engine, but add to it, meaning that other factors, such as the presence and concentration of the search term on a given page, still play a role.
Boosting values
- Below 100: A value below 100% will decrease the ranking of the result
- 100: A boosting value of 100% is neutral and equal to no change in the ranking
- 101-1000: A boosting value of >100% and up to 1000% will increase the ranking of the result
The lower or higher the boosting value, the more you will affect the underlying algorithm. For example, if something is boosted by 800%, this is very likely to set aside most other logic in the search. This could be risky and damage relevance, which is why we at Cludo recommend working with softer values.
What can be boosted?
URL values
Results that match a specified URL pattern will get boosted.
Example
Boosting /schools/ by 150% would generally prioritize pages that match this pattern, increasing the ranking of those results whenever they appear in the search.
Field value
Results where a field matches a certain value will get boosted. Because it requires a fixed value in the field, this type is most useful when the field represents a list of predefined values like Category, Brand, Author, etc.
Remember that the field value boosting is case-sensitive, meaning that the value you enter must reflect exactly what has been indexed, uppercase/lowercase letters included.
Example
A boosting of 125% for the field Category containing “News” will increase the ranking of results that belong to the category “News”.
Field search
Results where a specific field matches the search term will get boosted. This is useful for defining certain fields which are more or less important to match the visitors’ search, such as meta description, meta keywords, etc.
Example
A boosting of 180% for the field Keywords will increase the ranking of results where the search term matches the keywords on the page.
Dynamic
With dynamic boosting, you can control boosting on a page-level. To use dynamic boosting, you will want to have a field in the crawler that pulls a number value on the page. In most cases, one would have a meta tag reserved for this where the author can enter the desired boosting value. The crawler will then pull this number on the page, which can then be used for dynamic boosting.
Date Freshness
When the crawler is configured to pull a date from the pages, such as the publish date or last updated date, this field can be used to enable Date Freshness boosting. With this type of boosting, you can select an interval in which the result should rank higher. At the end of that time period, the page’s relevance will be gradually reduced to its previous level.
Example
Setting the “release_date” date field of a product to “within 1 month” will boost pages with a more recent release date, and cause pages with an old release date to appear lower in ranking.
Files
This option allows you to add a boosting that will affect all file results. By default, the engine is set with a 30% boosting of files, assuming that files are generally less important to the visitors than web pages.