Relative importance of common and uncommon words in phrases

[Marcia]

I've got the index page of a site ranking nicely (# 5 out of 174,00 at Google) for a four word phrase, and while three of the words do appear on the page, the fourth is not on it at all, nor is it a term used on the site as a whole, except in one place on an interior page. The phrase does, however, appear in the same sentence as a few inbound links, though not in the link text itself.

I know there's some relative weighting applied to the individual words in phases, related to how common or uncommon the particular individual words are.

I'm also wondering about the effect of this on phrases used in page titles, as well as the sequencing of the phrases in the page titles. How much effect does it have, in general, to have exact phrases in page titles, as opposed to the words appearing with other words separating.

I can't remember what to look up for this - I know there's a related article.

[ihelpyou]

Well Marcia, it is now late here and I am having a hard time following your question. :)

If you are asking if it is better to have your phrase in the title All together(side by side), then the answer would be Yes.

Not only does it seem to get more relevancy that way but searchers do enter a search term in quotes to find exact matches of results.

[seth_wilde]

"weighting applied to the individual words in phases, related to how common or uncommon the particular individual words are"

Yep, what your describing is IDF (inverse document frequency). There have been a couple threads in the AV forum about this.

[webmasterworld.com...]

But what I think your seeing is Google's use of off page content from links. There have been some high profile cases of this happening with microsoft and dubya coming up under some rather unflattering search phrases.