On site searchable product vs Search Engine searchable question

[galati]

We are updating our website using the Levels theme. Our current website we use power search and tag discontinued products with <!-- miva_nodisplay //-->. This made these products non-searchable on our website, but it allowed Search Engines to still index the items and include them in the SE results.
Are the any alternative/better methods to accomplish this now? Or just reset back up Power Search? I read that a new search will be included in the new update of Miva. When is that due out and will something like this be included? I am excited about the built in proposed faceted search with this update, but if we implement Power Search just for the no-show of discontinued products, I'm guessing we won't be able to use the updated MIVA search if something like this is not included.

[galati]

Anyone have any idea's about this? I know others use Power Search with <!-- miva_nodisplay //--> to make products non-searchable within Miva. I would rather use the standard search or new coming search in the future update, but we have hundreds of discontinued items we do not want showing up in searches within our site...

[Kent Multer]

Why do you still have discontinued products on your site? Maybe there's a better way to handle that, which will bypass the search-results issue.

[galati]

Because these product pages still show in search engines which drives traffic to our site. There is no buy button on these pages, and we offer alternative products on these pages with a 5% off promo.

[Kent Multer]

There are other ways to handle discontinued products. Many stores set up type-301 redirects so that customers looking for these products will be redirected to a similar product, or to a category page that contains a number of similar products. I've written modules to do this; and in Miva version 9, it's built-in to the store with the URI Management settings.

[VisHorizons]

I have a very similar desire: I need to hide certain products from the search results.

I use Power Search, but I'm updating to Levels and I want to use the more sophisticated native search.

We offer a choice of free items to everyone who goes through checkout. I use the upsale feature. I created a product called free-gift with an attribute that allows customers to choose one of five free thingies. I don't want free-gift showing up in searches.

Also, preventing certain categories from showing up in searches as well would be great.

[kayakbabe]

We have a few upsale type items that we want to make sure they aren't search results too.
It would be a pain in the butt to have to hard code and check for just a few product codes on the srch results.
I wonder if this has been addressed in some way yet.

[afiumano]

We also need this. We have items that go out of season that do not need to be removed but need to be unorderable for a short time. We don't want them coming up in search since that is frustrating for the customer. Has anyone found a solution for this?

[AHerb]

We're converting some discontinued products to a "static" pages where it's clear that the product is out and proposing a substitute. Few discontinued products are just redirected to their analog.
We don't have too many of them though.

[Kent Multer]

Hiding products from search results usually requires a change in the search algorithm. I haven't worked with the new faceted-search features in Miva; do they allow you to set up a facet for a custom product field? If so, I think you can create a "DontFind" custom field to mark the products you want to hide, and create a hidden facet that will cause all searches to leave the marked products out of the results.

I've written search modules that provide facets for custom fields; so if anyone needs this now, you can email me.

Thanks --

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

We're converting some discontinued products to a "static" pages where it's clear that the product is out and proposing a substitute. Few discontinued products are just redirected to their analog.
We don't have too many of them though.

This is a very good idea if the product is not coming back in stock. One could probably even automate it.

The other 'pretty damn' simple approach is a custom field and then wrap the return results with "IF NOT(CustomField)".

[afiumano]

That is what we currently do - a custom field with this conditional on the SRCH page: <mvt:if expr="NOT('SAWA' CIN l.settings:product:code OR.........

But Miva still 'counts' the item even though it is hidden. This causes blank pages as you scroll through multiple search results pages sometimes. For categories, we have to move the item to the bottom of the list so it doesn't mess up item count on each page as much.