Site Areas rules allow you to influence search results by increasing (boosting) or decreasing the ranking of certain areas of your website, or excluding them completely, based on matching URL patterns.

For example, you can decide to boost your product pages higher in the search results and lower the importance of your press releases.
The default ranking is 100%. To boost, select a weight higher than 100%. To reduce ranking, choose a weight under 100%.

The following video and step-by-step instructions will guide you through using Site Areas rules to boost or exclude specific areas of your website.

Increasing or decreasing ranking with Site areas

You can increase or decrease the ranking of an area of your website by following the instructions below:

1. Log in to the AddSearch Dashboard
2. Go to Site areas
3. Click Add new url +
4. Select Contains, Ends with, or Regular Expression to choose type of the rule from the dropdown menu
   • If Contains is selected, you can input a pattern such as /blog/ and all URLs containing this pattern will apply to the Site area rules.
   • If Ends with is selected, you can input a pattern such as .html, .php, .pdf and all URLs ending with this pattern will apply to the Site area rules.
   • When the Regular expression option is selected all URLs matching your regular expression apply to the Site area rules
5. After choosing the type, input the pattern or regular expression to the input field
6. Choose the weight from the drop-down menu on the right of the input field to increase or decrease the ranking of the URLs matching the pattern
7. Click Save to submit changes

The Site area weights are applied in real-time after they are saved.

Excluding with Site areas

You can exclude an entire site section or a single page by following the instructions below:

1. Log in to the AddSearch Dashboard
2. Go to Site areas
3. Click Add new url +
4. Select Contains, Ends with, or Regular Expression to choose type of the rule from the dropdown menu
   • If Contains is selected, you can input a pattern such as /blog/ and all URLs containing this pattern will apply to the Site area rules.
   • If Ends with is selected, you can input a pattern such as .html, .php, .pdf and all URLs ending with this pattern will apply to the Site area rules.
   • When the Regular expression option is selected all URLs matching your regular expression apply to the Site area rules
5. After selecting the type of the rule, input the pattern or regular expression to the input field
6. Select Excluded from the drop-down menu on the right of the input field to exclude URLs that match the pattern
7. Click Save to submit changes

Please note that exclusions require a recrawl. If you want to update the index after you have created the Site areas rules you can start a full recrawl or a recrawl for individual URLs the Dashboard’s Index tools page.

For more information visit our documentation on exclusions.

Site areas checks rules from top to bottom

Site areas processes the rules sequentially from top to bottom. Here’s how it works:

1. We start with the first rule in the list
2. We then check if a URL matches this rule
3. If a URL matches, we stop the sequential check, apply the rule to the URL (this could be either excluding it or including it with a certain boost), and ignore the remaining rules in the list.
4. If a URL doesn’t match the rule we continue to the next rule

Examples

Index only /blog/ and /products/ and exclude all other URLs:

To boost all pages in the search results that reside in /products/, you can select Contains from the drop-down menu, input /products/ into the input field, and select a weight higher than 100%, say 150%. Conversely, if you want to reduce the importance of an area, select a weight under 100%.

To lower the importance of all URLs that end with pdf (all PDF files) to 50%, you can select Regular expression from the drop-down menu, input .*pdf$ to the input field and select a weight of 50% from the weights drop-down on the right of the input field.

Please note that these patterns will be matched against URLs in the order they are listed. Arrange the list so that the highest priority patterns are on the top and don’t put generic URL paths above specific ones.

Inspect URL

Site area tool contains Inspect URL tool that allows for checking whether Site area rules affect a URL. Follow the steps to inspect a URL:

1. Add the URL in the input field under the Inspect URL heading
2. Click the Test URL button to inspect URL

If the URL matches a Site area rule, a prompt will appear beneath the input field. The matching rule will also be highlighted with a blue border around it.