frogg - 7:39 pm on Aug 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

I think google have recently been turning down the 'weight' of variation words (stems/synonyms) and thus increased the weight of exact-matching words.

At least, this is how it appears in my field -- mine and my competitors sites do not change much over time (well, certainly haven't changed much recently), so all other factors remain about equal.

I posted a longer message on this subject in another thread (in which it is probably a bit off topic [shrug]).

How does the above idea fit in with the changes people are experiencing / have experienced in their ranking?

Maybe it's not the only factor at work, but I've definitely seen changes in stemming/variation/synonym weighting over the last weeks.

/frogg