Darshan Hiranandani : How can we ensure that the link takes users to the most pertinent section of the page?

General Discussion
1

Hello Team,

I’m exploring ways to enhance our search functionality by linking directly to relevant sections within a webpage. Specifically, I’m interested in the following:

Objective: When a search term matches content under a specific heading or section with an anchor (like #section-3), the search result should link directly to that section.

Questions for the Team:

Native Support: Does our current system support linking directly to page anchors based on search queries? If so, how can we implement this?

Alternative Solutions: If direct linking isn’t natively supported, could we process the page content at crawl time? For instance, can we treat each section with an anchor as a separate document to facilitate this?

Technical Feasibility: What are the technical challenges and solutions for setting up direct links to anchors based on search terms?

Implementation: Are there tools or methods you recommend for achieving this functionality? For example, using JavaScript for dynamic linking or modifying our search indexing process.

Best Practices: What are the best practices for ensuring that users are directed to the most relevant section without disrupting their browsing experience?
I’d appreciate any insights or suggestions on how we can effectively implement this feature to improve user experience on our site.

Thank you!

Best regards,
Darshan Hiranandani

2

Hi Dashan,

Funnelback indexes documents at the page level so you can’t link to a specific section of a page, which is how most search engines will deal with web content. You can turn on query biased summaries that will show snippets of text surrounding the keyword as the search result summary, which can help.

However as you have suggested you could split the page using a filter. If you are in the Squiz DXP then you can use the Split HTML/XML filter to achieve this Plugin: Split XML or HTML :: Squiz DXP Help Center In earlier versions there is no out of the box solution that allows you to split HTML files so you would need to write your own document filter.

As a general rule it is better to keep source content pages shorter and focussed on particular topics where possible, which gives a similar outcome and will improve the findibility of content within your site.