Manage authoritative pages

APPLIES TO: yes-img-132013 yes-img-162016 yes-img-192019 yes-img-seSubscription Edition no-img-sopSharePoint in Microsoft 365

As a Global Administrator or SharePoint Administrator in Microsoft 365, 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.

Authoritative pages only work for classic search and only for web parts that use the default ranking model.

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 A typical example of a non-authoritative page could be the URL of a site that contains outdated information.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. Go to More features in the SharePoint admin center, and sign in with an account that has admin permissions for your organization.

Note

If you have Office 365 operated by 21Vianet (China), sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center, then browse to the SharePoint admin center and open the More features page.

  1. Under Search, select Open.

  2. On the search administration page, select Manage Authoritative Pages.

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

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

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

  6. In the Non-authoritative Sites section, in the Sites to demote box, enter 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/.

  7. Select OK.

How results are ranked

Classic 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.