Manage authoritative pages

As a SharePoint Online administrator, you can influence the pages or documents that should appear at the top of your list of search results by identifying high-quality pages, also known as authoritative pages. Authoritative pages link to the most relevant information. A typical example of an authoritative page could be the home page of your company portal.

If you have specific knowledge of an area, you can influence the relative importance of pages by adding more levels of authoritative pages (second-level and third-level).

In the same way, you can also add non-authoritative pages. A typical example of a non-authoritative page could be the URL of a site that contains outdated information.

Specify authoritative or non-authoritative pages

1. Sign in to the Office 365 Admin Center.

2. Choose Admin > SharePoint. You're now in the SharePoint admin center.

3. Choose search.

4. On the search administration page, choose Manage Authoritative Pages.

5. In the Authoritative Web Pages section, in the Most authoritative pages box, type the URLs of pages that are the most important. Separate the URLs with returns so that there is one URL per line.

6. In the Second-level authoritative pages box, type the URLs of any pages that should be seen as second-level.

7. In the Third-level authoritative pages box, type the URLs of any pages that should be seen as third-level.

8. In the Non-authoritative Sites section, in the Sites to demote box, type the URLs of any sites that you want to be ranked lower than all of the other sites. Type one URL per line.
   

   Tip:  All URLs whose prefix matches the prefix of a URL in the Sites to demote box are demoted. Example: Entering http://archive/ demotes the rank of all URLs that begin with http://archive/.

9. Click OK.

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How results are ranked

Search uses the list of authoritative pages to calculate the ranking of results. Static rank determines the relative importance of a page. Static rank is calculated as the smallest number of clicks that it would take a user to navigate from an authoritative page to a document. The closer a document is to the most authoritative page, the higher the static rank of the page is.

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