Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
What's up with that?
The order of words can dramatically change the meaning of the phrase so Google tends to treat them as unrelated.
e.g.
"Tool Sales"
"Sales Tool"
Even though your two words may mean the same thing there's good reason for Google to treat the differently, especially as computers can't easily determine the meaning of a search phrase.
When I search for "Widget Blue", I'm on page 3 (position 30) in Google. If I rever the keywords and serach for "Blue Widget", I'm #2..What's up with that?
Word order is one of the factors that Google looks at in determining relevance.
What's the order of the words in your title, on your page, and in the inbound links to your page?
Title is "Widget Blue" as well as the anchor text of all the inbound links. That's why it doesn't make any sense to me...
- Which is more competitive... "widget blue" or "blue widget"? As an approximate measure, try searching on Google for the exact phrases (ie, with quotes) to get the number of pages that satisfy each query.
- Did you ever rank well for "widget blue" (I assume here you're searching without quotes), or are you just coming up in the rankings?
- Is your site new or old? How old? How old are your inbound links?
- Are your inbound links different, or are the all the same? What's the quality and relevance of the pages that link to you, and what's their relationship (ownership and hosting) to each other and to your site?
Others should jump in with other questions that need to be looked at.
"blue widget" is much more competitive.
- Did you ever rank well for "widget blue" (I assume here you're searching without quotes), or are you just coming up in the rankings?
I'm coming up in rankings. It's a fairly new product (only about 6 month old)
- Is your site new or old? How old? How old are your inbound links?
My site is about 4-5 years old.
- Are your inbound links different, or are the all the same? What's the quality and relevance of the pages that link to you, and what's their relationship (ownership and hosting) to each other and to your site?
all different.
While all that can be of interest has been asked, if a phrase is not yet known to Google, ie. people don't bid on it in AdWords, people don't search for it, or at least not in great volumes, the phrase won't be treated as a phrase.
Meaning when looking for widget blue, they'll first query "widget" and look up "blue" within the results.
This leads to the query "widget blue" only return sites that do extremely well for "widget" and have "blue" somewhere on the site... in their inbounds, nav, title... etc.
Once the whole phrase is fed to the algo, things become different and you don't have to do all that well for "widget" to be on top for "widget blue" although... you see word order means that the initial trust thresholds are set differently. You HAVE to be trusted for widget in order to even appear for any queries that start with it. How much trust you have to have depends on how many words you type after "widget". Eg. a site that's #1-#5 for a 3 word phrase "widget blue mycity" can completely disappear when looking for "widget mycity" even if its more relevant than the rest. This threshold also gets adjusted once a phrase becomes stand alone, which is different from just a 2 word query.
...
How is your site doing for widget?
[edited by: Miamacs at 10:09 am (utc) on June 26, 2007]
My site is ranked #5 for the keyword "Widget".
