Best practice: Adding metadata to a site collection

Copper Contributor

Hello,

 

I'm using SPO and I'm only interested in using the modern experience.

 

I have a scenario where I will have potentially thousands of sites sitting underneath one hub site.

 

I would like to add metadata to each site collection (or in modern SPO, they are simply called "Sites") to aid with searching (especially when modern search results finally become customisable).

 

What is the current best practice approach for adding metadata to a site collection?

(Options I've heard of include: adding it to the Property Bag for the site collection OR adding metadata to the site pages library of the homepage - both of these solutions seem far from perfect).

 

Best Regards,

5 Replies

IHi

 

I'd also like to know about this, can metadata be assigned automatically to all docs within a site, within a document library etc.

 

The Metadata taxonomy in the new Sharepoint Online seems a bit redundant now, i maybe wrong, but i only see meta data related sites referring to Classic sites and of course with Sharepoint Online your search results can now search the document content so is it needed? @ushka_ushka 

@Richardcolton Metadata is most definitely needed and it's not just a classic thing. Whether you use the Term Store, or just different types of columns to apply metadata to your content, it will improve the searchability of your content. Especially once modern search becomes more robust.

@Beau Cameron is there a current recommended best practice for adding metadata to a modern SPO Site? e.g. do you add the metadata to the property bag or to the homepage via the Site Pages document library?

 

Since I have thousands of sites underneath the hub site, I would like to add metadata to the actual Sites themselves so when you search for a piece of metadata like lets say "Country" you can do a search for "India" and it will bring up all Sites that have metadata Country = India.

 

When you add the metadata to the Home page for example, it brings up the icon of the page in the modern search experience, rather then the Site.

@ushka_ushka Can someone from Microsoft please advise what is the best practice approach to adding metadata to a SPO Site to help with how it appears in Modern Search? 

This is the best approach I've found, applying in Modern MS Search by keylabel in the search (last image):
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/53246.sharepoint-online-using-indexed-pr...

If you need some more customization in the results, like refiners, I guess you could go with PnP Modern WPs https://microsoft-search.github.io/pnp-modern-search/
If you deploy it in some site, avoiding confusion between different searches, maybe you could disable global MS Search at the site https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftsearch/manage-spo-search-box