Strange Google results depending on query style

[jmorgan]

I have a relatively new site (about 2 months old) and I was just playing around with a long tail query and Google is returning some strange results.

Query: 5 widgets widgetland
Results: Nothing for my site (Only about 65 results) but some results for various pages with not necessarily specifically on "5 widgets widgetland" but various combinations of those keywords.

Query: 5 widgets widgetland site:mysite.com
Results: Page titled "5 widgets widgetland" on my site comes up

Query: "5 widgets widgetland"
Results: Page titled "5 widgets widgetland" on my site comes up

I just find it strange that my site would obviously be relevant for the query but not returned at all in the broad matching query. However, it's still returned if I used the 'site' operator or if I do an exact match using double-quotes.

Anyone know why this would be?

[jimbeetle]

The fact that a page from your site appears in the SERPs for the quoted search, coupled with the fairly new age of the site, would lead me to suspect that it's in Google's supplemental index. These are pages that for a variety of reasons, Google is not too sure about as yet. Many times these pages only appear in the SERPs for more specific queries for which Google doesn't have enough candidates in its main index.

Duplicate content, confusing URLs are a couple of the reasons pages can be in the supplemental index. But by far the biggest reason is PageRank as Google's indexing algorithm is pretty much built around it as a factor: the higher the PR, the more important the page, the more frequently it will be spidered and the more likely it will move to the main index.

The best cure for this, as always, is more incoming links.

[jmorgan]

Thanks for that. You're probably right. That page probably needs a bit more link juice for Google to consider it relevant for broad matches.