Recommended Keyword Rule Sorting Order

The SiteGenesis keyword sorting rule represents best practices for creating a keyword sorting rule.

The order in which sorting rules are applied by default in the SiteGenesis application are as follows:

1. Explicit category placement: you can assign a position for a product in the results returned for a category. This is only used when a customer is navigating to a page and not for keyword searches. The category position isn't overridden by any of the sorting rules listed below.
2. Explicit product placement: you can assign the Search Placement attribute for any product to values of 1-8 (NLA - Top Featured). Explicit product placement takes priority over sorting rules 3–6.
3. Explicit search rank: you can assign in the Search Rank attribute for any product a value of low, medium, or high. Explicit search rank takes priority over sorting rules 4–6.
4. Availability ranking: you can let the availability of an item influence its position in the search results, so that out of stock items appear at the end of the search results. Availability ranking takes priority over sorting rules 5–6.
5. Text relevance: you can boost the importance of certain attributes, so that if a search term is found in that attribute it's treated as more significant than other fields. For example, if you boost product name, then if the term is found in the product name it's treated as more important than if the term is found in a long description. Text relevance takes priority over term frequency.
6. Term frequency: if all sorting is removed and no sorting rules are configured, results are returned based on the frequency of the query term in the indexed fields of the document.

The Show Orderable Products Only preference completely removes unavailable products from search results. You can also remove individual unavailable products from the search results.