1script - 4:01 am on Aug 30, 2010 (gmt 0)

You want longtail exact matches in the content, not the title anymore.

Maybe not so categorically - just quickly looked through a couple of my site's GA stats via "Top Content" -> "Entrance Keywords" and the best keywords (phrases, really) could be found exactly as entered by the searcher in neither title nor content. I mean, all of the individual words comprising the phrase are there, some in title and some in content, some in both, some multiple times. Also, I should admit the meaning was still pretty much dead on but the exact phrase was definitely NOWHERE on the page and sure enough - if you enclose the phrase in quotes, my page does not come up.

This was by far not a scientific investigation - just a quick look to see if it warrants digging deeper but it showed right away that it's not quite that simple.

By the way - a side note to this mini-study: I noticed that the quality of results in quotes (exact match) very quickly deteriorates, much quicker than the loose match. First couple results are fine but by the time you hit #11 some strange results crop up - error pages, spam, keyworded subdomains, long query strings as part of URL and such. It's also not so very "exact match" right after you leave the first page. On the other hand, if you don't use quotes, you get 6 pages of good results (I simply did not go farther, there could be more). I guess there is some merit to the idea that G* does not really care much about geeks searching and using any of the operators (site: vagueness also comes to mind) - general public would almost never use quotes.