Why do you get such high Number of Uses in Magento Search?

It can be misleading and meaningless. You take a look at your search report (which shows what words and phrases are being entered into the product search of your Magento store) to see what the popular phrases are and hey presto it shows that hundreds have searched for a phrase that has no meaning to your store at all. How has this happened? What can you do to stop it happening? Lets start with the basics. Magento has been built with search engine optimisation in mind and this is a great thing. But some of the SEO techniques it uses can distort the figures of your search report. Here is how. Every time someone types in a search it is recorded and the number of uses will be added to by 1. Seems reasonable. What also happens is the search phrase is published to a page on your store (you can find the page by visiting www.yourMagentoStore.co.uk/catalogsearch/term/popular/ ) with a link to the search results. What happens is every time someone clicks on the link on this page it increments the number of uses for that search result by 1. This still seems reasonable. Now here is the problem and it is to do with how search engines look at the content of your website. For a search engine to know what the content of your website is it must visit it ñ it then follows links through your website using something that is often referred to as spiders, crawlers or robots. These follow anything that looks like a link and then indexes the content on the search engine. When they find the page www.yourMagentoStore.co.uk/catalogsearch/term/popular/ they will follow every link on that page. Every time they do that they increment the number of uses by 1. This could feasibly happen several times as day by several different search engines and before you know it the number of uses has become hundreds if no thousands and so distort your report. It can be fixed, you will need to be able to access a file on your server call robot.txt ñ in here add /catalogsearch/ to your list of denied folders. This tells the search engine to not crawl any pages here and so they will not follow the links. You can then go and tidy up your search results in the backend of the system by going to >Catalog >Search Terms where you can change the figures and organise your search terms.