MWT Search Steer WordPress Plugin

WordPress search only looks at a post’s title, excerpt and content. MWT Search Steer lets you decide, post by post, what your site search finds: hide a post, add keywords that bring it into the results, or add stop keywords that keep it out.

MWT Search Steer on WordPress.org

What it does

• Hide from site search keeps a post out of every search. Use it for thank-you pages, landing pages, old announcements and anything else visitors shouldn’t find by searching.
• Search keywords bring a post into the results. Give “Returns and exchanges” the keywords refund and money back, and a search for “refund” finds it, even though the word is nowhere in the post.
• Stop keywords keep a post out of the results for some searches only. Give an old “Refund policy (2019)” the stop keyword refund, and a search for “refund” never shows it, even though its title matches.

Set them in the editor sidebar, in Quick Edit, or for many posts at once with Bulk Edit. A Search column and a filter on the post lists show which posts have search settings.

Under Settings → MWT Search Steer you choose the post types, whether keywords match whole or partial words, which list wins when a search matches both, whether keyword matches are listed first, and whether the settings also apply to REST API and AJAX searches. Case and accents are ignored, so “Café”, “cafe” and “CAFE” are the same keyword.

Moving from another plugin

MWT Search Steer imports the posts that Search Exclude, Hide from Search or Hide Posts hide from search, with one click. The other plugin’s data isn’t changed, so you can import, check, and then deactivate it.

Built to stay out of the way

• Only the search query changes. Menus, archives, widgets, related posts and every other query on the page are left alone.
• Nothing is hidden in wp-admin, so editors can always find hidden posts.
• No search index, no custom tables and no migrations. Settings live in post meta and private taxonomy terms that WordPress already indexes.
• Visitors never see a post’s keywords or that it’s hidden, and the REST API only shows them to people who can edit posts.
• No ads, no dashboard widgets, no upsells and no outside service.

Good to know

• It controls the search on your own site, not Google. To keep a page out of search engines, use your SEO plugin’s noindex setting.
• It works with the WooCommerce product search. It doesn’t work with plugins that replace WordPress search, such as Relevanssi, SearchWP, Jetpack Search or ElasticPress.
• Developers can apply the search settings to their own queries with the mwtss_applies_to_query filter, or skip them for one query by passing 'mwtss_skip' => true to WP_Query.

Source code and support

The code is on GitHub, and questions go to the support forum on WordPress.org. The plugin also has a page on the site of Master WebTools, my studio.

Screenshots

A search for “refund”: the returns page is found by its keyword and listed first, and the out-of-date 2019 refund policy is kept out by its stop keyword.

The editor sidebar: hide the post from site search, and add its search keywords and stop keywords.

The Search column shows each post’s keywords, stop keywords and whether it is hidden.

Quick Edit changes keywords, stop keywords and “Hide from site search” without opening the post.

The settings: post types, how keywords match, which list wins, the order of the results and where search settings apply.

Import the posts that Search Exclude, Hide from Search or Hide Posts hide from search, with one click.