Any way to bump up an article in search results after tagging?

  • PROBLEM: When users search our online help, the search results don’t include the relevant article on the first page of search results. We are using the Heroic KnowledgeBase theme and authoring articles.

    I have tried tagging the article with the search terms I want the article to appear for (e.g., “survey” and “create survey”). When I type “survey” into the WordPress search bar, the article I tagged appears 16th in the list (on the second page of results). When I type “create survey”, the article appears 7th in the result list. If I type “create survey” with quotes around the text, I get zero search results.

    QUESTIONS:
    1. How do I get the article to appear in search results when quoting a multi-word tag?
    2. How do I get the article to appear HIGHER in the search results list?

    Thanks for any help/tips/work-arounds/fixes!

    • This topic was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Everything else WordPress topic

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    The default WP search (as in example.com/?s=survey) only searches title, excerpt and content fields. Tagging wouldn’t help any. Results are ordered by most recent localized publish date. Your easiest option would be to simply edit the most relevant article’s publish date.

    Searching for more than one term would require every term to appear somewhere in the searched fields (AND logic). Posts with only one matching term will not be part of the results. If you really want to use OR logic instead, the query’s SQL would need modification.

    The query vars used for searching could be modified to include different fields or to order results by different criteria through the “pre_get_posts” action. Requires some custom PHP coding to do so.

    If you are using some other search mechanism, I suggest asking for help through the dedicated support channel of that mechanism.

    Thread Starter rkennedyallego

    (@rkennedyallego)

    BCWorkZ, thank you for your response. I don’t understand the purpose of tagging if it doesn’t help users find posts/articles. Why tag anything then?

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    Tagging is a way of organizing posts, similar to categories, but slightly different. One can easily get all posts tagged with a certain term, but it’s not a “search” per se. The default search query doesn’t consider tags at all, but that’s not to say it couldn’t be expanded to include tags in the query. There are a number of advanced search plugins. They quite possibly could consider tags in a search query.

    The default search also doesn’t do a “best fit” ordering of search results. There’s not adequate information to decide if one post is a better fit than another (beyond newness). Again, perhaps one of the advanced search plugins may offer some sort of best fit ordering.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘Any way to bump up an article in search results after tagging?’ is closed to new replies.