How To: exclude welcome pages in search results

Remember there was a ‘welcome page search retrieval’ issue in SP 2007? If not… take a look at http://svengillis.blogspot.com/2009/02/no-searchresults-for-content-available.html

Fortunately, this issue has been fixed in SP 2010. In some cases, you still want to exclude welcome pages in the search results – just like in the old days.

To do this - follow the steps below:

• Navigate to the Search Service Application
• Make sure you did a full crawl on your content source
• Create a new rule in your search scope (all sites or whatever) as follow:
  
  
  
  By creating this rule you’ll eliminate the site URL (eg. /news) items. At this moment, the site default page URL is still included (/news/pages/default.aspx). In the next step we are going to eliminate them too…
• Create a new Crawl Rule
  
  
• Make sure you’ll do a full crawl again and that the Search Scopes are updated
• Notice that no welcome pages are found in the search results