Just doing some research for a potential client. Hard not to be specific but I'll try.
They supply (and design) luxury indoor or outdoor... widgets. The sort that most would have to pay by the hour to use.
Not surprisingly, when you search for 'widget(s) county' or 'widget(s) country' the listings are full of leisure listings (local council, real authority sites) with some accommodation mixed in (big bucks lotsa links). No real problem there; I'm sure that's what most people want.
However if I add 'company' the results hardly change, and certainly not the top ones.
What I found interesting is that when I checked the cached result for first place it said that the word company "only appeared in links pointing to this page". However when I then searched for 'widget county -company' I got the same site in first place.
I've read about and seen rankings where the important 'modifier' word that makes a phrase focused would be mentioned in passing somewhere on the page. Here it's not.
So what are the options:
(a) the 'modifier' word is mentioned on pages that link to the top results and so gets bundled in with the anchor text, which is why the cached result says what it does, or
(b) Google are just plain ignoring the 'modifier' word because very few sites use it, whereas the sites that use the more common term are very high authority.
