de-emphisize PDFs in search results

[Veckley]

We have a large site which consist of thousands of pages and pdfs. We have been using zoom for a while now, and have found that no matter what we search for, the results are loaded with PDF's instead of pages. We can even search for the page names in the URL and H1 tag, and the PDF's are always scored higher.

All our newer pages are very well SEO optimized, and are doing well on the search engines, however our internal search engine using Zoom is not very useful since you have to sift through pages of PDF results to get to an approbate page result.

Due to the volume and complexity of our site, it would be much better use of our time to de-emphasize PDF's in the search results so that the pages will always come up first. Is there any way to do this? We still need them to show up in the results, but having the pages always rank higher than the PDFs?

[Ray]

Yes, in the Indexer, under "Configure"->"Weightings" change your setting for "Content density" to "Strong adjustment".

This gives preference to smaller documents. The reason the PDFs are scoring higher is likely because they contain so much content and the number of occurrences of the keywords matched are much higher within the PDF than on a typical web page.

You will need to re-index and re-upload your index files for this change to take effect.

This adjustment is designed for this purpose. Let us know if you still have trouble.