Page Boost does not appear to work?

[Anonymous]

I am searching for a specific page on our site to contact City Hall. I have page boosting turned on to +5 for title, +3 for description and +2 for keywords. On the page I have the title at "Contact City Hall" and the following Meta tags:

<meta name="keywords" content="contact city hall, phone, e-mail, contact us, city hall contact information, call city call">
<meta name="description" content="This page gives web site users different options to make contact with someone at City Hall. The main contact telephone numbers and various e-mail options are presented.">


On the page, there are various references to Contacting City Hall, City Hall Contact Information, etc... but when I search for the page, there are many listings that come up before the page (it is #10). Mostly, the PDF files appear above it but none of the PDF files contain the exact phrase. I have the search engine set to "all search words". If I type in "contact City hall" with the quotes, it comes right up, but I feel most users won't think about using the quotes. What should I do to make this listing appear higher??

Thank you,
Shawn

[Ray]

You can use the ZOOMPAGEBOOST meta tag to boost the weighting of words on a specific page. For example, the following will boost the words on a page by 5.

<meta name="ZOOMPAGEBOOST" content="5">

You can specify values from -5 to 5. A negative value would decrease the weight of words on that page, so you can potentially use a -5 pageboost on the PDF file to solve this problem.

We are also looking into adding a feature in Version 4.1 which will automatically weight the words on a page based on the word density (or the size) of the document. This means that files such as large PDFs would not end up "hogging" the top result due to the large number of words that appear in the file.

[soatley]

To specify the page boost to a PDF file, would i have to make a DESC file? And what is included in there?

Thanks,
Shawn

[Ray]

Yes. The DESC file can simply contain just that meta line. You can also put a meta description, meta keywords or an alternative document title in there too, if you want. For example, for the file "mydocument.pdf", you would create a text file named "mydocument.pdf.desc" which contains the following:

<title>My PDF document</title>
<meta name="description" content="Custom description for this PDF document goes here">
<meta name="ZOOMPAGEBOOST" content="-3">

Not all tags are required, just put in the ones you need.

[soatley]

Ok, I will give that a shot. If I just include the pageboost tag, will it still index the PDF file for the rest of the content (it is a 300 page PDF)?

Shawn

[Ray]

Yes. The importance of the words found in the PDF document would just be increased or decreased depending on your ZOOMPAGEBOOST value.

[soatley]

One thing I noticed is that if I don't have a DESC file for a PDF and I have the DESC file option turned on, it comes up with the title from my custom 404 error page and the context of the PDF file. The ones I do have a DESC file for, it comes up with the filename of the PDF. Is there a way for the indexer to realize that there isn't a DESC file and insert the PDF File name?

Thanks,
Shawn

[Ray]

We could not reproduce this behaviour with a normal HTTP redirected 404 page. However, your site might not actually be "redirecting" to a 404, but instead, uses server-side scripting (eg. a php or asp page) to dynamically generate different output when the file is invalid (or something similar). In this case, it is possible that Zoom would not be able to tell the difference.

If your site is online, can you give us a link to the URL in question? We can then take a look at what it does to serve up the custom 404 page.

Can you also tell us what web server you are running (IIS, Apache, etc).

[soatley]

We are running IIS 6 and unfortunately, the server is not open to the public on the outside yet. :) For the time being, I have turned off the PDF searching because I couldn't get the results I was looking for without using the DESC files and I didn't want to create DESC files for all PDF's.
I will let you know once it has come on line though.


Thanks!!
Shawn

[Ray]

Just so you know, there is a "Use meta information from plugins" option which will retrieve the Summary info from the PDF itself (eg. "Title", "Subject", "Author"). However, this might not be useful if your PDFs do not have meaningful fields entered here when they were created.

Hope that helps.