This document discusses how WordPress determines what content is indexed and searchable on a website. It explains that WordPress indexes the title, content body, titles of internally linked posts, categories, tags, and custom taxonomies of posts. The title is weighted most heavily at 80 while categories are weighted at 20. Internal links, HTML tags, shortcodes, and special characters are cleaned up. Common stop words are also removed.

1. Related Content

2. Hallo, met Barry
WooCommerce Developer @ WooThemes
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3. Indexation

4. Indexation
• Performance
• Server load
• Control

5. It s what you write about

6. It s what you write about
• It s not always what you think
• Forget tags & categories
• No extra hassle

7. – Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
“I like good strong words that mean
something…”

8. It s In The Words
• The title of the post
• The content/body of the post
• The title of internal posts you ve linked to within your content
• The post s categories
• The post s tags
• The post s custom taxonomies (Premium only)
• Third party registered meta data

9. Weights

10. Weights
• Based on origin
• Title - 80
• Categories - 20

11. Internal linking

12. Internal linking
• Search for internal links
• Use title s of internally linked posts/pages/CPT

13. Cleaning up

14. Cleaning up
• Remove all HTML tags
• Remove all shortcodes

15. Plain ASCII
• Replace special characters with their normal equal

16. – Wikipedia
“In computing, stop words are words which are
filtered out before or after processing of natural
language data (text).”

17. Stop Words
• Remove stop words
• like, the, a, for, etc.
• Supported for multiple languages

18. Relevant Words
• Only keep those that occur > 3

19. Relative amounts
• Don t store the actual word count
• Based on the total amount of words

21. Barry Kooij
@CageNL
barrykooij.com