Bug making relevanssi displaying posts from excluded categories

First of all, if you have content that is not supposed to be searched at all, it’s best to not index it at all. The “Category exclusion” setting has the content in the index, it’s just generally not shown in the search results.

When you search for nothing, the default WordPress behaviour is to return all posts. So that’s basically what should happen. However, Relevanssi should still use the category exclusion setting – at least that’s what happens on my test site when I run a search without any search term.

If you install Query Monitor, what does the search query look like when you run an empty search?

@msaari hi.

I’ve installed the query l monitor, but there’s so much data, don’t know where to look..

The exclude has been working before, I tested it for a couple of months ago..

Could it be some kind of new incompatibility issue with Elementor?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by Jellico.

Check under Queries > Caller “relevanssi_search()”, there should be a query that begins SELECT DISTINCT(relevanssi.doc). What does that query look like?

@msaari

SELECT DISTINCT(relevanssi.doc), relevanssi.*, relevanssi.title * 5 + relevanssi.content * 1 + relevanssi.comment * 0.75 + relevanssi.tag * 1 + relevanssi.link * 0 + relevanssi.author + relevanssi.category * 1 + relevanssi.excerpt + relevanssi.taxonomy + relevanssi.customfield + relevanssi.mysqlcolumn AS tf
FROM www_relevanssi AS relevanssi
WHERE relevanssi.term = relevanssi.term
AND relevanssi.doc NOT IN (
SELECT DISTINCT(tr.object_id)
FROM www_term_relationships AS tr
WHERE tr.term_taxonomy_id IN (5,478))
ORDER BY tf DESC
LIMIT 500

There’s a category exclusion there: no posts from the taxonomy terms 5 and 478 should not be included in the results.

If they still are, then the problem is not in Relevanssi: Relevanssi is excluding them, all right.

But if you never want to have these posts in the search results, it’s better to do it this way:

add_filter( 'relevanssi_do_not_index', 'rlv_exclude_cats', 10, 2 );
function rlv_exclude_cats( $block, $post_id ) {
    if ( has_term( array( 5, 478 ), 'category', $post_id ) ) {
        $block = true;
    }
    return $block;
}

Add this to theme functions.php and then rebuild the index. This should make sure those posts are never returned in search results. If it’s not working, check the numbers: usually term taxonomy IDs as reported in the query match exactly to the term IDs this function needs, but not always, so if these do not work, you can replace the numbers with the slugs of the categories, wrapped in apostrophes (like this: array( 'news', 'category_b' ) instead of array( 5, 478 )).

@msaari hi again!

The id didn’t work, but the slugs solved the issue thx a lot!