The possibility to control the room temperature Er3+ photoluminescence efficiency in silica is investigated in terms of the damage produced in Er-doped silica by implantations at different fluences with Xe or Au ions. These implantations are tailored to reproduce the same level of damage in Er-doped silica. The remarkable differences in terms of the photoluminescence intensity between Xe- and Au-irradiated samples allowed to decouple the detrimental effect of the implantation damage on the photoluminescence from the beneficial broad-band energy transfer process provided by molecule-like Au clusters formed upon thermal annealing. The evolution of the implantation damage is followed by photoluminescence and correlated to the local Er-site by x-ray absorption spectroscopy.