Improving your ANU Search ranking
Search engines use a complex set of rules to figure out what results should be listed first.
The following tips are specific to getting the best possible ranking in ANU Search (Funnelback).
- Use metadata
- Have short URLs for key pages
- Hide unimportant content
- Consider requesting a 'featured page'
1. Use metadata
Metadata is information about your content such as title, subject, and description. In the ANU Search engine pages with metadata are ranked higher that those without. For example, when searching for "Kangaroo", a page about Kangaroos with metadata that includes "Kangaroo" would be ranked higher than a page about Kangaroos with no metadata.
Metadata appears in the code of a web page as a META tag. These tags are bolded in the example below:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>About the Platypus - ANU</TITLE>
<META NAME="DC.Subject" CONTENT="Platypus; Marsupial; Australian; Native">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>The Platypus</H1>
<P>The platypus is an aquatic animal native to Australia.</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>
There are many metadata tags that you can use, but the recommended ones are dc.title, dc.subject and dc.description. Learn more about applying metadata to your pages.
2. Have short URLs for key pages
The ANU Search assumes that pages with shorter URLs are closer to the top of the web site tree (www.anu.edu.au) and so are more important or key pages. ANU Search gives extra weighting to pages with shorter URLs.
In many cases you cannot do much about the URL you have (especially if you work in a content management system) but you can arrange for an "alias" to be set up on the web server. For example, the alias www.anu.edu.au/reporter points to the longer URL http://info.anu.edu.au/mac/Newsletters_and_Journals/ANU_Reporter/index.asp.
Contact the DOI Help Desk to request an alias (this is for key pages only, there is a limit to how many aliases the server can hold!).
3. Hide unimportant content
Hiding content from the ANU Search ensures that the search results page displays only the most relevant or important content on your site. Reducing the amount of content that the ANU Search has to index also ensures that your site is indexed faster.
You may wish to hide non-content items such as footers, duplicate text version pages and directories containing images and code.
There are three ways you can hide content:
- Use tags within pages to exclude parts like footers, navigation and other code. Content between the tags <!-- beginnoindex --> and <--- endnoindex --> will not be read by ANU Search.
- Use tags within a page to hide just that page. Within the <HEAD> part of your page include <meta name="Robots" content="noindex"> to stop the page from being indexed.
- Use a robots.txt to exclude ANU Search from entire directories of your site. See Control who can index your site for details.
4. Consider requesting a 'featured page'
One way to guarantee your site appears first in the search results list is to request a 'featured page'. The ANU Search can be set up to display a particular page first when users search for specific terms. For example, the web site for ANU Branding has been set up as a featured page for the term 'style' (see image below). You can request up to 3 featured page search terms for a URL via the DOI Help Desk. Read the instructions for Requesting a Featured Page.
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