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"blue and yellow widgets"
when i search for "widgets" it is in the top ten out of about 2,500,000 results.
when i search for "yellow widgets" it is on the 34th position out of about 500,000 results.
when i search for "blue and yellow widgets" it is on the 125th position (!) out of about 65,000 results.
what could be the reasons for this?
I'm sure that people think I'm being glib when I write that the only reason for a site being at position X is that X-1 people are beating them, but it does help to think along those lines IMO.
The site comes top for "widgets", because no one can beat them for that word. This is almost certainly because many people with high PR pages link to them using the word widgets.
33 other sites can beat them for "yellow widgets", because they are more focussed for that phrase. This may also be due mostly to anchor text, but title and body text may play a more important role.
The 124 other sites beat them for "blue and yellow widgets" because they are much more focussed for that phrase. It wouldn't surprise me if the title and body text of a lot of those pages match the phrase exactly.
Although most of these pages don't have anywhere near the PageRank and incoming anchor text weight for the word "widget", the links that do point to that page probably include the words "blue" and "yellow", as well as "widgets" (I don't think that word order matters in link text).
