Recommended links

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This feature allows you to specify a list of keywords or phrases that you can associate with specific URLs. When a user does a search for a matching word or phrase, these recommended results will then appear before the rest of the search results like so:

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These recommended links will not only appear above all other results, but they can also be customised to stand out from the other search results. By using new style sheets classes it will, for example, be possible to make these results appear in bold or be highlighted with a different background colour (as seen above). You can also configure them to appear in the same manner as normal results (by appearing before any other search results).

The Recommended Links feature allows a wealth of new possibilities. It means you can effectively override the current #1 'organic' result with a result of your own choosing.

Some examples of use could include,

Directing people to the right product home page based on product number.
Selling search results positions on your web site. Doing this would provide new income streams for sites that choose to do this. How much if the #1 search position worth on your sites search engine?
Directing people to your most profitable products

You can manage your list of recommended links from the Configuration window (under the "Recommended links" tab).

You can specify the maximum number of recommended links to display per search, with 3 links being the default maximum. It is also possible to have multiple recommendations for the same word and control the priority by adjusting the order of the rows in the list above.

Note that each recommended link must have a keyword (or key phrase), URL, and a title. The description field is optional and limited to 300 characters per recommended link. The keyword for the recommended link may contain wildcards (e.g. "*" or "?") so if you create a recommended link for the keyword "drive*" it will appear when searching for "driver", "drives", etc.

You can also import and export a large collection of recommended links from/to a text file by clicking on the "Import" and "Export" button respectively.

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Tip: Recommended links will match against the full search query, so a search for 'text box' (ie. without quotation marks) will also return the recommended links entered for the word/phrase: text box. Note that some characters (such as brackets and other punctuation characters) and spaces may be stripped or trimmed from your keyword or phrase. This is so that the phrase will match the search query (which will also have such characters stripped or trimmed).

The following are some examples of recommended link entries, and an explanation of search queries that will yield its return:

Example 1.

Word:

help

URL:

http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/

Title:

Technical support and help for Zoom

Description:

Support, FAQs, and more

The above recommended link will appear for any search queries containing the single word help. However, it will not return for a search containing an exact phrase (assuming exact phrase functionality is enabled, and the query uses double quote characters) such as "help file".

Example 2.

Word:

help file

URL:

http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/usersguide.html

Title:

Users Guide

Description:

Comprehensive users guide to Zoom

The above recommended link will appear for a search query containing the exact phrase "help file", but it will not return in a search for the single word help. It will however, also return for the two word search query help file (ie. without quotation marks).

Importing and Exporting Recommended Links

If you have a large list of recommended links to add or maintain, you can import them from a text file created by any text editor. The file needs to be pipe separated (the pipe is the vertical '|' character), with a recommended link entry per line. For example:

Keyword1|http://www.url1.com/|Page title|This is the page description

Keyword2|http://www.url2.com/|Another Page title|This is the page description for the 2nd page

 

You can also export an existing list of recommended links to a text file of this same format. This way you can maintain them outside of Zoom if need be, and/or import them back in to other ZCFG files.