Title Weight Isn't Working

If I type in “pit bull”, I get pages and pages of results, and they do look like Relevanssi-generated results.

The order of results seems a bit off, though, for example when searching for “iowa”, the one post with the word in the title is not on the top (and the top post only mentions “iowa” once in reference to that post).

Are you using some post order plugin, for example Intuitive Post Order or something like that? If you are, that may be messing with the order of the results. See here for a solution.

Correct. But I weighted the title 50.

I want search results to favor the title first, then the words in the article. So, if I did a search for pit bull, all the articles with the words “pit bull” in the headline/title should show up first. This is not happening, which is why I am wondering about the weight feature not working.

I am not using any plugin.

Does increasing the title weight to 500 or 5000 make any difference in the results?

If it does, good. If it doesn’t, then something’s messing with the results after Relevanssi. If not a plugin, then it may be your theme.

Are those related links added to the posts manually or with some automatic process? I think the search results would be improved if Relevanssi didn’t index them – it doesn’t really help if the only place where the post matches the search is the link to another post. Premium has an useful feature you could use here, unfortunately it’s not available in the free version.