Disclosed in embodiments of the present application are a method and device for sorting content documents. The method for sorting content documents comprises: establishing a reverse index for reference content documents according to index terms in a reference content document library; selecting key words in target content documents, the target content documents being content documents to be sorted and recommended to a client; searching for corresponding index terms according to the key words, so as to obtain a corresponding reverse zipper from the reverse index; setting sorting scores of the target content documents according to the reference content documents in the reversed zipper; and sorting the target content documents according to the sorting scores.