Indexing Special Content

After you have successfully crawled your website, you should take a moment to consider whether you have other valuable content that isn't available in your search results yet. Maybe you spent a lot of time crafting an informative FAQ, or there are a few special pages on a sister site that would be interesting to your visitors. Maybe you did not know that you can show relevant YouTube videos directly in your search results!

Indeed, the Site Search 360 Data Sources section of the Control Panel lets you add all your best content to your search results.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Indexing

For FAQ indexing, you have two options: index existing FAQ pages with the Custom FAQ section, or create a new FAQ for your site using the free Site Search 360 FAQ generator.

Custom FAQ

If you already have an FAQ page and you'd like to make every single Q&A block easily searchable (vs resorting to the CTRL+F shortcut to find the information within the page), follow these steps:

Go to Data Sources -> Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Indexing and select Custom FAQ.
Input your FAQ page URLs.
Make sure your Q&A elements are consistent throughout the page. For example, every question can wrapped in an <h2> tag, and every answer can be wrapped into a <div class="faq-answer"></div> element.
Point our crawler to these elements by specifying the corresponding XPaths, e.g. //h2 and //div[@class="faq-answer"]
Press "Test FAQ Extraction" to preview the extracted Q&A blocks. Every block becomes a separate search result and when the user clicks on it, the page will scroll down to the exact Q&A excerpt.
Don't forget to save your settings.

Schema JSON (Site Search 360 FAQ)

If you don't have an FAQ page then you can create it using our free FAQ generator. It is really easy to use - you will be prompted to provide questions and answers that you want to have in FAQ. At the end of the configuration, you will need just to copy the code to your website where you want the FAQ to appear. Once FAQs are visible on your website, you can connect them to indexing by selecting in the control panel: Data Sources -> Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Indexing -> Schema JSON (Site Search 360 FAQ).

URL List Indexing

For one reason or another, our crawler may fail to pick up some URLs, or you might just need to index a small number of specific pages. In this case, we have a third crawling option: the URL list. With this feature, you can add pages to the index manually.

This method is different from adding URLs one by one under Index:

The URL List isn't purged upon a full re-index, whereas links added manually under the Index section are deleted from the index.
The URL list allows you to add links in bulk by clicking "Edit as Text", instead of copying and pasting them individually.

Please keep in mind that the URL List can’t be used to process large volumes of data. It can only contain up to 2.000 pages per project, though we’d encourage you to opt for a custom sitemap instead even if you intend to populate the URL List with several hundred pages. You’ll thus minimize the pressure put on your server and speed up all subsequent re-indexes significantly.

Note: No-index, white- and blacklisting rules you choose to implement will only be applied to content pushed to the search results via sitemap(s) or root URL(s). Pages added to the URL List will appear in the search even if they meet the no-indexing/blacklisting criteria. Similarly, they will be rendered searchable despite matching the established whitelisting pattern.