Controlling Indexing from Page Markup

Wrap any region that should not be indexed in an ignore block:

<!--keyoti_search_ignore_begin-->
    <nav>
        ... site navigation ...
    </nav>
<!--keyoti_search_ignore_end-->

Text between the two markers is skipped entirely. The region still renders normally for visitors; it simply contributes nothing to the index.

This solves a problem every site has. Navigation menus, headers, footers, cookie banners and sidebars repeat on every page, so without ignore blocks the words they contain appear on every page in the index. A visitor searching for a term that happens to appear in your footer gets the entire site back, and page summaries in results fill up with menu text instead of actual content.

Worth wrapping:

• Primary and secondary navigation
• Headers and footers
• Cookie and consent banners
• Sidebars of related links, tag clouds, and social media widgets
• Breadcrumb trails
• Any "you may also like" or promotional block repeated across pages

Caution
Be careful not to wrap the page's main content region. If a template's ignore block is opened too early or closed too late, whole pages index with almost no text — they appear in the Index Results, but searches never match them. If pages are indexed yet unfindable, check the template's ignore blocks first.

A boost marker raises the importance of the text that follows it, so pages matching a search term within that region rank above pages matching it in ordinary body text.

A boost region is opened with the desired factor and closed by returning the factor to 1:

<!--keyoti_search_weight_boost_factor="20"-->
    <h1>Product Name</h1>
<!--keyoti_search_weight_boost_factor="1"-->

A factor of 1 is normal weight, so the closing marker returns subsequent text to its usual importance. Higher factors count for more.

Important
Always close a boost region. Because the factor stays in effect until reset, a missing closing marker boosts the remainder of the page, which flattens the ranking benefit and can distort results across the whole site.

BWA already applies this mechanism on your behalf for meta keywords and meta description, using the two weight factors on the General tab. Setting those values is the simplest way to influence ranking, and is usually enough; use markers directly only where you need to weight a region that is not covered by them.

Weights are relative, so what matters is the ratio between them rather than the absolute numbers. The platform defaults give a sense of scale — meta keywords default to 20 and meta description to 10, against body text at 1.

Change one value at a time and rebuild before assessing the effect. Because weighting is applied while pages are indexed, a change only reaches pages indexed after it — clear the previous results to force a full rebuild, or you will be comparing pages weighted under different settings.

1. Clear the previous index results and rebuild.
2. Search for a word that appears only inside an ignore block, such as a navigation label. It should return nothing.
3. Search for a word from the main content of the same page. It should return that page.
4. Search for a term you have boosted and confirm the boosted page ranks above pages mentioning it in passing.

A page-wide boost, and keeping a page out of the index altogether, are both available as settings in page properties. Prefer those — BWA emits the same markers for you, they can be changed by whoever maintains the page, and there is no template edit to review. Hand-written markers are for what those settings cannot express: excluding a region within a page, or boosting one part of a page above the rest. See Search Settings on Individual Pages.