How to bury product attributes for your search experience
Burying product attributes in the search experience lets you downplay entire groups of products that share specific characteristics—such as brand, color, or material—when shoppers use certain queries.
When shoppers search for these terms, products matching buried attributes are pushed lower on the search engine results page (SERP), so more strategic items can appear first while organic relevance is still respected. By configuring burying rules at attribute level instead of for individual products, you can systematically reduce the visibility of less aligned, low‑margin, or outdated assortments across multiple search journeys without removing them from your catalog.
In Empathy Platform, product attributes burying is managed from the Playboard using the Results Ranking management tool, so you can adjust product positions and immediately see the impact on the search results page.
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Willing to know more about all that you can do by using Results Ranking? Check the Results Ranking management tool page to discover it.
Burying product attributes for your search experience
Imagine your clothing store is running a campaign celebrating original, non-traditional suits and wants vibrant colors to stand out from classic neutrals in search. When shoppers search for terms like “suit jacket” or “bold blazer”, you can configure a bury rule for the black color value so suits in this color are pushed toward the bottom of the SERP, while colorful options like red, coral, or pink remain at the top. This way, black suits are still available for those who scroll, but the most visible results highlight the unconventional, eye-catching styles that match your campaign’s creative vision.
To bury this product attribute in your search experience, perform the following steps:
Open your Playboard and go to Play > Results Ranking.
Click the + New button in the top left corner to create a new Results Ranking configuration. The Configuration panel displays.
In the Details section, make sure the toggle button is switched on so that the configuration is active once it's saved.
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If you turn off the configuration, you can turn it on later using the action tools in the results ranking list screen.
Enter a name for your configuration. For example, "Original suit styles".
Select the endpoint your configuration relates to. In this case, select the Search endpoint.
In the Endpoint section, indicate the queries that the bury configuration should apply to. For example, you can type "suit jacket" and "bold blazer".
Select the desired options for the filters to customize the scenario for your configuration. Remember that the available filters depend on your implementation. For this example, select "English" for the Language filter.
In the Settings section, go to Product Ranking to configure a soft ranking. Soft ranking modifies product positioning by slightly decreasing the score of products whose attributes are being buried, causing them to appear lower on the SERP.
- Click the + (plus) icon. The Product ranking pop-up window appears.
- Choose whether the configuration should be always active or scheduled for a determined period. For this example, set the configuration to be active until the end of Feburary.
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Review the steps in Scheduling a configuration to learn how to schedule product ranking configurations.
- Select a product attribute and a value for it. You can search for the attributes and values to find the desired ones. If an attribute doesn't have any value available, you cannot create a configuration for it. In the example, the category is "color" and the value is "black".
- Click the Bury button to add the configuration to the list.
In the Preview section, review the product ranking as it will appear to your shoppers. Optionally, enter a keyword in the search box to narrow down the results. You can also select a date to preview the results for a specific time and check product positions in real time based on your configuration. Results update automatically as you make changes to the configuration.
Once finished, click Save to apply the configuration. The saved configuration is displayed in the configuration list on the main Results Ranking screen.