1st for "kw1 kw2" but nowhere for "kw1 kw2 sitename"

[edit_g]

This is a pretty strange one. Several keywords - 1st position for "keyword keyword" (everything without quotes in the actual search) and nowhere to be found for "keyword keyword sitename". Anyone have any ideas?

[tedster]

It is a strange result - all I can really say is it is clear evidence of how far Google has moved from the kind of text match search we first saw on the web. Their algorithms have a complexity and interaction of factors that is hard to build into a simple mental model.

For example, queries are broken down into various taxonomies. So it's very possible that the search for "keyword keyword" is tagged as "deserves freshness" or "needs disambiguation" or "heavily informational" - and that gets it processed through a different branch of the algorithm. Add any third word and the query can be removed from that special processing.

In the case you described, the third word is "sitename", so the result is very weird and algorithm branches don't seem to explain it well. But if I had to guess, I'd bet that the query taxonomy is at least playing a part.

I've also been noticing something that may be related. I've seen queries where "kw1 kw2" generates a certain estimated number of results and "kw1 kw2 kw3" can generate MORE results. That's also extremely unintuitive and could never have happened in "the old days".

[edit_g]

Thanks for confirming that I've not gone crazy. :)

[steveb]

There are a lot of searches where a page will rank very well for an exact match of its first words in its title, but add anything else and, poof, much worse ranking.

[bumpski]

Recently, within a week or two, for a couple days the site: operator results were not including supplemental pages, only non-supplemental pages were shown for this query. This could be one explanation.

It seems this quirk was short lived and now gone.

By supplemental I mean pages meeting this test:
-site:www.example.com/* site:www.example.com

Wow
www.Example.com has 9,330 pages of which
8,740 pages are supplemental, AND, it appears none of the pages exist! Post: 5/14/08 5:30 AM EDT US

[piney]

By "sitename", are you entering it with or without the dot com? How are your results on the sitename alone and the sitename with other keywords you're watching? If you add "-xyz" or any other non-applicable word to be excluded, do the results change? Mine improved (with an excluded word) when the site was a pr4. After it was a pr5, they remained the same.