How to bury products for your search experience
Burying one or more products lets you downplay items in your commerce store by configuring how they appear in search results. When shoppers enter specific queries, buried products are pushed further down the search engine results page (SERP), helping you reduce the visibility of low‑margin, outdated, or less strategic items while still respecting organic relevance. By assigning lower ranking values for particular queries, you can control which results appear at the bottom of the SERP without changing your underlying catalog data or general search configuration.
In Empathy Platform, product burying on the search experience is managed from the Playboard using the Results Ranking management tool, so you can adjust product positions for particular queries 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 products for your search experience
Imagine your clothing store is launching a winter accessories campaign focused on premium wool hats, and you want to avoid beanie hats dominating the results. When shoppers search for queries like “wool hat”, you can configure bury rules so casual beanie hats are pushed further down the SERP, while your more strategic wool hat styles appear first. By burying beanies for these specific queries instead of removing them from the catalog, you keep them available for shoppers who still want them, but reduce their visibility so search journeys highlight the products that best match the intent behind “wool hat”.
To bury these products 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, "Premium wool hats".
Select the endpoint your configuration relates to. In this case, select the Search endpoint.
In the Endpoint section, indicate the search queries that the bury configuration should apply to. For example, type "wool hats".
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 hard ranking, which moves selected products to the bottom of the SERP. Refer to the Considerations for burying multiple products section below to understand product positioning.
- 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 always active.
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Review the steps in Scheduling a configuration to learn how to schedule product ranking configurations.
- Enter one or more product IDs and press Enter. To add multiple product IDs at a time, use a semicolon (
;) or a comma (,) to separate them. For this example, enter "162065;161726;145921" to bury products with IDs 162065, 161726, and 145921. - Click the Bury button to add the configuration to the list. Remember that you can also bury products directly from the Preview section by hovering over a product thumbnail in the results list and clicking Bury. The product is added to the Product Ranking settings list and placed in its corresponding position on the SERP preview.
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.
Considerations to boost or bury more than one product
- Make sure you enter valid product IDs. Product IDs aren't checked against the product catalog. If you enter an invalid product ID, it will be ignored. All other valid product IDs are added to the product list.
- When several products are boosted or buried at the same time, the order they follow on the SERP is the order they have in the configuration list.
- Products with conflicts are highlighted in red. A conflict may occur due to an existing product boost or bury. For example:
- A product may have been boosted with an always-active schedule, and you try to create a new boost or bury for the same product ID, duplicating the product boost or bury.
- A product may have been buried with a schedule, and you try to create a new buried product with an always-active schedule. You can't boost or bury products with conflicts. In these cases, you should remove the product from the Product ID field to save the configuration for the remaining products, and revise the existing configuration for the product ID in the product list.
- If you want to change the schedule applied to the products or remove the boost or bury after you create it, you must edit or delete each product individually in the product list.