Labels are a single word or a multiple word phrase you can add to the default language version of a specific article in Help Center. You can use labels to influence article search relevance, to influence Answer Bot results (if you are using Answer Bot), or to create a list of related articles based on labels.
You can add and remove labels on individual articles or you can change labels on multiple articles at once. You must have Guide Professional or Enterprise to use article labels.
Adding and removing labels on individual articles
Labels are a single word or a multiple word phrase you can add to the default language version of an article in Help Center. You can add articles labels for multiple purposes, including to influence search and Answer Bot results or to create article lists (see Understanding why to use labels).
You can add and remove labels on individual articles or you can change labels in bulk for multiple articles at once.
- In Help Center or Guide, navigate to the article where you want to change labels, then click Edit article in the top menu bar.
- (Guide Enterprise only) If you are on Guide Enterprise, click Article
settings.
This step is not necessary on Guide Professional.
- In Labels in the right sidebar, start typing the label you want to add, then
select Add as new label or select the matching label, if it exists.
You can add a maximum of 50 labels. You might have to scroll down to see labels. See Best practices for adding labels.
Labels live on the default language article and not on translations of the article. If you have translations, you can add labels in multiple languages to the default article.
- Add multiple labels as needed.
- If you need to remove a label, click the x beside the label name.
- Click Save.
You must manage labels on each individual article or using the API. There is no global management for article labels.
Changing article labels in bulk on multiple articles
You can add or remove labels to on multiple articles at once.
- In Guide, click the Manage articles (
) icon in the sidebar.
- Find the articles you want to update by browsing, searching, or using a new or existing articles list.
- Select one or more articles to change labels.
You can select a maximum of 30 articles at a time.
- Click the Article settings menu at the bottom, then select Change labels.
- Do any of the following:
-
Add a new label: Enter the label, then click Add as a new
label.
-
Add an existing label: Search or browse to find the labels you want to add,
then select any empty checkbox or any checkbox with a minus.
The minus sign (
) indicates that the label appears on some but not all of the selected articles. When you select it, it changes to a checkmark (
), indicating that it will be added to any selected article that doesn't already have that label.
You can select multiple labels to add to the selected articles.
-
Remove an existing label: Search or browse to find the labels you want to
remove, then deselect one or more labels.
The checkmark (
) indicates that the label appears on all of the selected articles. The minus sign (
) indicates that the label appears on some but not all of the selected articles. When you select a checkbox with a minus sign, it changes to a checkmark.; click it again to deselect the checkbox.
You can select multiple labels to add to the selected articles.
-
Add a new label: Enter the label, then click Add as a new
label.
- Click Change.
The label changes are applied to the selected articles.
Understanding why to use labels
-
Influence article search relevance
Adding labels can make your articles more search friendly. They are not designed to be used for fine-grained control of ranking. For example, if I have two articles about making waffles, one with the word "temperature" in the body of the article, one with the label "temperature", the labeled article will be ranked higher if a user searches for the word "temperature".
Labels are indexed for search with a bit less weight than the article title, but multiple labels with similar words can outweigh the title and body of the article. Use labels carefully as you can significantly impact the relevance of your search results and usefulness. If you are considering using labels to impact search relevance, consider that efforts to do so could end up with inferior ranking performance for your users. The best way to have your article perform well in search is to create a short and focused article, where the title and body include keywords and clearly connect to each other.
To learn more about search, see How end-user search works in Help Center.
-
Influence Answer Bot results
Answer Bot uses labels to influence the results it shows. It allows you to define a whitelist of articles that are allowed to be used when looking for relevant matching results. You are able to add up to ten labels that serve as an OR filter, allowing you to expand the whitelist to any articles containing any of the defined labels.
To learn more about Answer Bot, see About Answer Bot.
-
Create article lists
Article lists enable you to get an overview of all your published and unpublished knowledge base content, and then refine that view by using search and applying filters to build article lists. For example, you can find articles that have a specific article label, such as out-of-date.
To learn more about article lists, see Creating article lists to different views of your knowledge base content.
Best practices for adding labels
Labels can help boost the search relevance of an article. However, you should use labels carefully and sparingly. It's more important to make sure the article title and body contain the relevant keywords.
-
Use single word labels where possible, instead of multi-word phrases
It is possible to add labels as single words or as multiple words or phrases. In general, it's more efficient to use single word labels. If you add a multi-word label, the search engine breaks it into individual words to perform the search. For example, if you have a label of "late delivery," it gets broken down into "late" and "delivery" for search.
Avoid using long phrases as labels to boost an article's ranking with respect to a query. For example, "Can I return something I ordered online to my local store." Instead, you should modify the article's title or content to make it literally relevant to the query.
-
Do not include variations of the same word, including different tenses or plural
forms
You do not need to include multiple labels for variations of a word. For example you do not need a label for "return" and "returns" or "update" and "updated." Search stemming allows different forms of the same word to match. In particular, the singular and plural forms of a word will generally match.
-
Use a limited number of labels, instead of overloading an article with labels
Use labels sparingly. Adding lots of labels might actually diminish any matches on labels. This is because it is assumed that matches with a fewer number of labels beats matches with more labels. And too many labels might outweigh the relevance of the title and body.
For example, if article 1 has the labels “car,” “automobile,” and “transport” and article 2 has only the label “car,” all other things equal, if the end-user searches for “car,” the article that has only the label “car” will rank higher. That is because, as a general principle, an article that is about one specific thing is more relevant than an article about many things, when a user is looking for that one specific thing.
Your best bet is to look at the top ranked search queries and make sure that they exist in either (but not both) the title or the labels. You don't give content an extra boost if you match a term across the title, body, labels, and comments.
Using the Help Center API to filter articles by labels
These two endpoints behave differently and will return different article results. They are programmatically different and query different data sources for their results. Learn more
62 Comments
Dan Ross Thanks for replying!
Here's the clarification I got on my end: The search function doesn't care about case, but separate labels will be created according to however the agent types them.
e.g. As an agent I can create ExBP or EXBP as new labels even though exbp already exists, but as far as information retrieval goes, the search treats them as equivalent. That's fine as far as it goes, but it does cause the label list to bloat.
I wonder if it would be simpler for labels to all be just forced to lower (or upper) case and avoid this confusion. Trying to enforce something like this procedurally is ineffectual.
Hey George Halet
I definitely agree, enforcing to all lowercase would be the ideal option (kind of like how tags in Support work), I hear you on the procedural management difficulties..
Unfortunately, I don't actually work for Zendesk or know of a way to change the behaviour.
I'd suggest you create a post in the Feedback section of the Community for Zendesk Guide, so the PM team will read and review it. Let me know when you post it, I'll definitely come by and add my upvote, it's a good idea!
Have a good weekend!
Dan Ross thanks for that suggestion
Mary Paez had the same idea in September. You could upvote her post KB article labels issues!
Good point, I've just gone and voted!
Is there any best practice to filter out junk searches?
Using the Search With No Results data, we have thousands of junk searches that we would like to eliminate so that we can focus on proper searches that need to be tagged to real articles.
Currently, we've tried creating a dummy article with a lot of these 'junk' words as tags, but if it limits to 200, this will run out extremely fast.
Hell Wade Fitzner,
When it comes to optimizing your searches in Guide, this can sometimes feel like more of an art form than a science. While what works for one userbase doesn't always work for another, we do have a list of recommended practices to optimize your search results in the article linked below. Let us know if there is anything else we can help with and have a great day!
About Help Center end-user search
Best regards.
Devan - Community Manager - Thanks for the response, but I have already exhausted the "best practices" previously before posting.
I do agree that userbases will differ, and being able to not omit 200+ words/phrases is a huge issue for us.
Hey Wade! That's a great question, and unfortunately I don't have a wonderful answer. As a Content Manager here at Zendesk, I most often just export the search data to a CSV and ignore the junk search terms. The product doesn't have a way at the moment to tell the difference between a meaningful search by one of your users and a spammy search or a confused anonymous searcher, so it's all going to be included. My recommendation to you would be to focus your search tuning efforts on legitimate articles/keywords that are coming up most often for your users - other end users' junk searches don't have any impact on legitimate searches; the context-matching of your content and labels does!
Hi, it looks now we have a limit of maximum 50 labels added to an article
Hi guys, has something happened to labels? I've been trying to add a label with more than one word today and the box keeps deleting the previous word when I press space.
Hey Matt,
Looks like this is a known issue that our Guide team is looking into. I'm going to create a ticket on your behalf so they can investigate further.
Cheers!
I would like to clean up my Label list. Where do I go to see (and edit) all Labels created?
Hey Robyn,
At this time it is not possible to get a full list of labels within your Zendesk User Interface, though you can get a list of all labels or else a list of labels for each article by using our Help Center API.
I hope this helps!
Brett Bowser Not having a place to manage the labels is a definite drawback. It's my intention to put in a "Wish List" request. So, on that same note, I'm assuming this means that we don't have the ability to edit an existing label. For example, if I want to change a Label that contains a misspelling.
Robyn Casanova if you know what the misspelled label is already, you can Filter your search on Guide by Label. Type in the incorrect label you're looking for. That will bring up all the articles with that misspelling and you can bulk edit them to remove that label and add the correct one. When there are no articles in your KB containing the incorrect label, it will not be "auto-suggested" when creating labels for articles, anymore.
This article says the max is 200 labels but I receive an error when adding more than 50. While I don't see any reference to a Professional versus Enterprise label max, I wonder if we are limited by having a legacy version of Guide Professional?
Hi Holly,
The limit actually is 50. Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I think we had some confusion on our side earlier. I will flag this article for an update.
Thank you!
Is there any limit on the total number of labels you can have created in your Zendesk Guide?
Hello Jay Lee,
There is indeed! You can add a maximum of 50 labels, and if you have any other questions regarding this aspect Guide, I'd recommend the following resource.
Best practices for adding labels
Best regards.
Hey Devan - Community Manager thanks for the response. To clarify, I did see that it's 50 max labels on each article, but I'm asking more in regards to if there are limits on the total number of labels an organization can have in Guide? (For example, If I add a unique label to every article I create, will I eventually hit a cap on how many unique labels I can have in the system?) Thanks!
Hi Jay Lee
I don't believe there is an enforced limit for total number of labels in your Help Center. But there is a limit of 40,000 articles and 50 labels per article, so the limit might be 40,000 x 50. There is no limit on unique labels--they are all be different if you want.
Hope that helps!
Hi,
I had a question on the 200 labels and that if 1 label, say 'Marketing', is applied to 50 artilces does that count as 1 label or 50 within the 200 label limit?
I suspect it would be 1 label but wanted to be sure.
Hi Kamal! Great question and sorry for any confusion - there is no overall limit to the number of labels you can use across your help center - you can have as many unique labels as needed throughout your knowledge base. However, a single article can only have 50 labels. So in your example, "marketing" could be applied to as many articles as necessary, but each of those articles can only have 50 labels each.
Hello,
I have a question about how labels work for translated articles. Our original article is in English. We add the translated Japanese version to each article. The original article has some English labels, so these are applied to the translated article as well.
Thank you,
Is there any way to add additional labels (more than the allotted maximum of 50)? Maybe through some type of programming or paying for an additional service/add-on?
Hi Jason! Can you tell me a bit about what you want additional labels for? Is it for organizing/filtering content, improving search results in Guide, improving SEO in Google, etc?
Hi Madison!
This is needed for more search results in Guide and for organizing content. We will need a significantly higher amount. Is this possible? If not, what would be the most ideal work-around?
-Jason L.
Hi!
Is there an update for my instance of Zendesk and having more than 50 labels?
-Jason L.
Hi Jason -
I talked with the product manager, and apparently we do allow increased labels on a case-by-case basis. I'm going to create a private ticket for you so that he can help determine if your account is one we can do this for and get that set up if so. Please look for that ticket and email notification from me shortly.
Hi All
Just wondering if article labels also influence the 'ticket deflection' feature in Guide...you know when a requester starts typing into the subject field of a request form, suggested articles are offered (see below).
Do labels also influence these results?
Cheers
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