{"id":319,"date":"2013-08-23T13:21:02","date_gmt":"2013-08-23T17:21:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dontpapanic.com\/blog\/?p=319"},"modified":"2016-04-21T10:53:58","modified_gmt":"2016-04-21T14:53:58","slug":"configuring-search-authoritative-pages-with-powershell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dontpapanic.com\/blog\/?p=319","title":{"rendered":"Configuring Search Authoritative Pages with PowerShell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"logo-powershell\"<\/a>Someone at work recently asked if you could configure the Authoritative Pages settings in SharePoint 2013 Search using PowerShell or whether the only way to do it was using the Search Service UI.\u00a0 After a bit of research I found out that indeed you can configure the settings using PowerShell.\u00a0 But I also found out that there isn\u2019t a lot of documentation available on the web about exactly how to do it.\u00a0 The difficulty is made worse by the fact that most of the documentation that does exist is for SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search and there is a new required parameter in 2013 that makes all those Blog posts invalid.\u00a0 So I decided it would be a good idea to write a \u201cHow To\u201d post that would explain the required PowerShell.<\/p>\n

What are Authoritative Pages?<\/h2>\n

When SharePoint web site pages and documents are returned in Search results one of the factors that effects their relevance placement is static rank<\/em>.\u00a0 Static rank is computed as the smallest number of clicks it would take a user to navigate from an authoritative page<\/em> to a document. The closer a document is to the most authoritative page, the higher its static rank is.\u00a0 Search Administrators can enter three (3) levels of authoritative pages for calculating the static rank of a search result.\u00a0 They can also add site addresses to a fourth level which will demote the static rank of a specific result when compared to all other references.\u00a0 In other words the closer a specific document is to one of the three authoritative pages the higher it will appear in a set of search results, while results that come from the non-authoritative sites will be at the bottom of the search results list.\u00a0 For example, you might list a team site that contains draft copies of documents in the Non-authoritative sites and the home page of a document center site contains published copies in the most authoritative pages section.\u00a0 This would lead to the elevation of published copies in search results instead of draft copies.<\/p>\n

The PowerShell Cmdlets<\/h2>\n

There are two sets of PowerShell Cmdlets used to manipulate the authoritative pages settings.\u00a0 First, there are four (4) Cmdlets for creating\/managing the three (3) main authoritative page lists.\u00a0 They are:<\/p>\n