Sorting results by ABC

[willing]

Is it possible for results to be published/shown by alphabetical sort (perhaps on the page title). I ask because some of our sections are advertising sections and the same search result will bring up 50 or so results, but they seem to be appearing at random (but the same each time I do the search), so some advertisers probably won't be too happy about that...

Any way round this?

Thank you

[Ray]

No, there is no supported method of sorting results alphabetically by their titles. In most cases, this is very rarely of any use. I'm not even sure how it is supposed to help you in your described scenario but then I don't think I understand your situation fully.

What are these "advertising sections" you mention? Actual pages, or like an ad at the bottom of the page?

If you have sections of your site that should be excluded from searching, you can add the page by name to the skip list. Or you can exclude particular sections of a page. See the FAQ on this. This would make more sense than trying to sort the searches alphabetically, I would think.

[willing]

Thanks for that. I don't think I explained very well.

The pages I am talking about are paid-for listings. They are not brash advertisements, but pages of information - based on a template - for a similar service and they are paid for. So if I used a phrase that would effectively have the same importance for all of the results, the search is showing them in a certain way and I suppose I was just hoping that I might be able to specify settings. Or something.

(Can you tell even I am confused?!)



Thank you

[Ray]

Hmm... still hard to tell what you want to do with them. If you want to lower the ranking for these paid-for pages, you can do so using the ZOOMBOOST meta tag (with a negative value such as "-5"). See the Users Guide for this. If you want to increase their rankings, you can do so with positive ZOOMBOOST values.

Also check out the Weightings tab in the Configuration window for other options to change the way your pages are ranked. This FAQ may also help:
Q. How do I make some pages appear higher up in my search results? How does Zoom's page score system work?