Common Words Affect the Result

Stopwords in the search phrase affect Google results.

[helenp]

Been days trying to find out why my site dropped a lot for some keywords.

Just discovered that what google says is not true:
"in" is a very common word and was not included in your search.

using the kewords exampel+city I am on second page,
but using exampel+in+city I am first on first page.......
Wasn´t that way before

[MHes]

Word proximity has always been a factor, so although the meaning of the word is ignored, the presence of a word is not. The new algo may have changed your word proximity relevance for some searches.

[mrMister]

Thank you MHes, I'd never really understood the stop word situation before. Now it all makes sense :-)

helenp, try searching for exampel by city, you'lll get the same results.

MHes, just so I understand fully, you can you clarify this...

if helenp replaced all occurences of exampel+in+city on her site with exampel+by+city then it would rank the same also?

[shri]

if helenp replaced all occurences of exampel+in+city on her site with exampel+by+city then it would rank the same also?

Not always. The position for " in " might be related to inbound anchor text at times.

[mrMister]

Not always. The position for " in " might be related to inbound anchor text at times.

Eh? What difference does that make if stop words are ignored?

[MHes]

I lose the will to live when I start thinking about 'stop words' but generally it seems any stop word is just treated as 'any word' although I remember that there was a theory that when a placename was involved in the search, different results could appear depending on the stop word. I don't think this is still true but if you can find one then it could be significant.

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