Promoting useful information and web pages
February 8th, 2008 | Published in Google Custom Search
Webmasters often want the ability to promote specific information or web pages when users search for specific things via their Custom Search Engine (CSE).
Here are some examples where this is useful:
* You have a travel site, and want to draw attention to a spring promotion above the search results for keywords "hawaii", "maui", "kona". You want a nice image of the beach and the three most popular packages listed right on top.
* You've created a soccer search engine, and you want soccer fans to quickly get to the results of the Cup of Nations tournament in Ghana for queries [africa], [ghana], and [cup of nations]
* Your company just launched a brand new product, and you'd like people to know about it via a headline link to your product blog post when they search for older products in the same category.
We've always had the ability to do this in Custom Search (via a feature called Subscribed Links) but now, we've tried to make it a little easier for you.
When you go to to the control panel for your CSE, you'll see a new option in the "Preferences" section towards the bottom of the "Basics" tab. Selecting this option will enable your Subscribed Link to be triggered in your CSE for the keywords you've specified. If you don't already have a Subscribed Link defined, you can create one in minutes. Just specify the trigger keywords, the summary text you'd like displayed, and the URL of the target web page when the link is clicked.
When visitors search on your CSE using the special trigger keywords, your special link will show up right on top of the results, where they won't miss it.
You can manage your Subscribed Link via the Subscribed Link console. Check the developer documentation for advanced options. Remember that subscribed links display differently on your CSE (above the results) versus on Google.com (inline).