Non-Authoritative Sites in Enterprise Search

Question

I have two content sources.

The first is the SharePoint site itself, with around 400 items in its index on my test environment.

The second is a public facing website (external, non SharePoint) which we've indexed. This contains around 8000 items.

We want a search on the All Sites scope to return the SharePoint site results first, then the external, public site results at the end.

I've added the url to the SharePoint web app to the Most Authoritative Pages box (and even tried this without) - and added the external site to Non-Authoritative Sites.

However, the search results still appear completely mixed up together, with both the public and internal sites' results appearing randomly, using whatever ranking Enterprise Search Uses.

How can I enforce sites listed in the Non-Authoritative Sites to appear at the end of Search Results (Core Results Web Part)?

Answer 1

I think I resolved it.

First I wondered if it was the number of items in my test site, so I added 1200 other items.

Next I added another web app to the Most Authoritative pages, along side the main web app I'm wanting to surface to the top of the results, and kept the external site at non-authoritative.

Then I reset the index and Fully Crawled both sources. Seems to be fine now.