prevent Smart Search from picking up navigation links?

My guess is you're not doing "Page" search index, probably using the "Pages Crawler" index. Using a "Pages" index is the best way to eliminate those. If you're using the "Pages Crawler" it renders the rull page HTML and saves that to the index. You'd have to create a custom index or create an event handler which would only index the "

I am using Pages. With the Standard analyzer.

OK I found the issue I believe. It was searching AnyWord in my code (webservice based search) I needed to use ExactPhrase. I believe it's fixed now.

just in case there is article Exclude certain elements from Smart Search index

Peter I saw that article but it's from 2014 and the code does not work in Kentico 11 12

The concept is the same, you just need to update the code to work with v11 and v12.

is it? I couldn't find some of the pieces once it was ported over.

Yes, the concept is the same. You will have to dig into the API changes to find out what changed from version to version. Use this resource to find those changes.

https://devnet.kentico.com/documentation/api-changes/kentico-12

That's a pain the sample is for version 7.

Sorry to say James but not everything is copy and paste and not every possible scenario is part of the documentation or API examples.

There are Kentico Partners (myself included) who do this for a living and could be hired to update the code. Another option is if you have specific areas which are erroring out in your code you could post those along with your current version and ask what could be updated.