Question
How is the Related articles list in the Help Center populated? Can I influence what articles are returned?
Answer
Currently, you cannot influence what articles are displayed in the Related articles list.
Articles in this list are returned based off of a relevancy score between articles. This score is calculated via the following method:
- For each user, we keep a list of their recently viewed articles.
- When a user visits an article, we record the most recently viewed article as being related to the currently viewed article.
- Over time, each article will be "related" to a number of other articles. The more times an article has been marked as "related" to another article, the higher the "related" score will be. This means that the score (and therefore the results) will get better over time.
Example:
- User visits Article A.
- From Article A, user visits Article B.
- Article A's relevant score in relation to Article B is increased.
- Another user visits Article B and Article A is suggested as a related article.
For more information, please see our developer documentation on the Recent Articles Helper.
11 Comments
So... basically, "Recently Viewed" ultimately becomes "Related"?
And the content creators cannot provide any guidance as to what is actually related?
Do we have any feature or Ability to set ‘related FAQs’ against each FAQ. manually?
Any suggestions please welcome..
Thanks for your question!
I asked around with some folks here and their response is that the tool doesn't offer that kind of functionality; the actions are all organic based on the formula outlined in the article.
However, it is possible for you to write something custom to allow you to do what you want to do.
This functionality would be extremely appreciated if it was added. Right now I'm adding a "See also:" link at the bottom of my FAQ questions, but this really should be a smarter feature that allows for simply checking a box next to articles in a list, possibly with another checkbox for whether we want that link to open in a new window.
As it stands now, the Recently Viewed and Related Articles are just redundant variations on the same theme and aren't particularly helpful. Site visitors won't care, but they probably won't use those links all that much, either.
I can see that you use the term "user", but does it mean that the feature only calculates related articles based on logged in users or will it be all visitors?
I think this feedback is what we want?
@Karsten - yes, it is just logged in users.
misleading, not a helpful feature.
when i read the title related article, i am expecting to show all articles have the same label.
We noticed a lot of crawl errors in our google search console from the related links. Can these be generated to use actual urls to other help centre pages so that we do not received errors for the short term links?
Hey Joe,
If you're receiving crawl errors we can certainly dig into that more with you and see if we can figure out where the issue is coming from. Unfortunately there's no way to change the generated URL's.
I'm going to create a ticket on your behalf and pass this over to our Customer Advocacy team so they can assist further. You'll receive a follow-up email shortly stating your ticket has been created. Can you reply back to that email with any examples you have available so we can take a look?
Thanks!
We've been working with Envoy (partners of Zendesk) and they thought that titles of articles and tagging may influence "related articles". Is this true? Can we use that to help the algorithm of "related articles"?
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