How search ranking works
Sellers can pay to be seen sooner. They cannot pay to look more trustworthy than they are. Here is the whole mechanism.
The default order
Unless you choose a different sort, results are ordered by most recently moved to the top. For a Basic advert that is simply when it was published. For an Advanced or Pro advert it is when it was last automatically bumped.
| Basic advert | Ordered by publication date. No automatic bumps. |
|---|---|
| Advanced advert | Bumped to the top once every 24 hours. |
| Pro advert | Bumped once every 24 hours, and holds the top for longer. |
| Boosted advert | Bumped twice a day, about twelve hours apart, and shown in the separate Boosted block above the ordinary results. |
What paying changes
- Position in the default order, through the bump schedule above.
- A highlight (£5 for 7 days) puts an advert above the unhighlighted ones in its category on the default sort, and marks the card "Highlighted" so you can see that is why it is there. It does nothing at all on any other sort.
- Placement in the Boosted block, which is labelled as such, sits above the results, and is never mixed into them.
- How the card looks: Advanced shows a photo gallery inside the card, Pro plays video in it.
What paying does not change
- Any filter you apply. A paid advert that does not match your filters does not appear, ever.
- Any sort you choose. Sort by price and the order is price. Boosted adverts stay in their own block and do not jump the sort.
- Badges. ID verified, Licensed breeder and Verified rescue are earned by passing a check. They cannot be bought and there is no advertising tier that grants one.
- Reviews and ratings. A review can only come from a completed purchase through Panjo Pets Payments. Sellers cannot buy, solicit or remove them.
- Whether an advert exists at all. Moderation decisions are made against the posting rules and nothing else. Paying more does not get a rejected advert published.
Buyer Premium
A buyer with Buyer Premium can message the seller of a new puppy or kitten advert during its first three hours; other buyers can message after that. It does not change search order, and it does not hide any advert from anyone. Everybody sees the same results in the same order.
The sorts available to you
| Newest first | The default, as described above. |
|---|---|
| Price, low to high | Strictly by price. Bumps are ignored. |
| Price, high to low | Strictly by price. |
| Nearest first | By distance from the town you entered. Distances are town to town, because we do not hold anybody's address. |
| Best rated sellers | By average review score, then by recency. |
Which pages we let search engines index
Not all of them, deliberately. A breed page is indexable once there are at least three live adverts for it nationally; a breed-and-town page once there are two in that town, or eight in the region. Pages below those thresholds still work, still show you the nearest available animals and still link onward - they are simply kept out of Google and out of our sitemaps, because a page with nothing on it wastes your time.
Published under Article 5 of Regulation (EU) 2019/1150 as retained in UK law. If any of this stops being accurate, it is a bug: tell us.