Configure the portal site for search by internet search engines

We can enable the portal site for search using search services such as Google or Yahoo! Search on the portal site by external search services works for public portal pages only, that is, for pages that users can access without a user ID and password.

To make the portal available for search by internet search engines, we configure search with external search services. Register the portal with the external search service(s) of the choice. Give the URL of the portal to the search service providers so they can crawl and index the portal site. Depending on how you customize the portal, we might consider indicating the Site Map page rather than the portal home page, or otherwise enhancing the configuration.

Optionally, we can configure several additional aspects for search on the portal by external search services:

• By default, the Site Map portlet is available on the portal Welcome page. This way the external crawler crawls only the links of the Site Map portlet. If we change the portal, place the Site Map portlet on the portal home page. Otherwise the crawler can crawl all portal links and might trigger unwanted actions by action links, such as a Delete button. If we do not want the users to be able to see the Site Map portlet, choose one of the following options for placing the Site Map portlet:

  • Place the Site Map portlet in the theme of the portal home page.

  • Place the Site Map portlet on a separate page, and omit that page from the portal navigation.

  The location of the Site Map portlet in the portal determines the URL by which you register to the external search service.

• We configure the Site Map portlet to determine the depth to which the portal can be searched.

• We configure client identification for the external search engines.

• We configure the URL normalization. We do this by setting a property in the portal configuration service named portal WP State Manager Service in the WAS console.

• Configure the Search Sitemap portlet for search by external search engines
  The Search Sitemap portlet generates a navigable list of all public pages of the portal. We configure the Search Sitemap portlet to determine the limit to the number of links displayed per page.

• IDs for external search engines
  For the portal to recognize external search engines, portal provides a client that covers several popular search engines. This client is implemented according to the Composite Capability/Preference Profiles (CC/PP) standard. It has the capability HTML_SEARCH set. To add more search engines, we can configure the client as required.

Previous topic: Search the local portal

Next topic: Enable anonymous users to search public pages of the portal

Related tasks:

Set service configuration properties

Related reference:

State Manager Service