We recently implemented a title change to some of our pages to try to rank for "<our vertical> search". We have seen from the adwords keyword data that users sometimes actually type the phrase into the search engines in our vertical.
Since it isn't the main phrase folks use, we just stuck it at the end of the title, something like:
<subvertical> for <vertical> search <brand>
instead of
<subvertical> for <vertical> <brand>
When we implemented that change, Google started de-ranking th pages as it crawled them. We removed the word "search" from the titles and rankings came back.
It could be that Google doesn't like the longer title, or thinks our pages are less focused. But I think that some algorithm is really disliking pages that say "search" in the title.
My theories:
1) Google sees other search pages as competition
2) Google sees "search" as indication that the pages is built with lower quality search results
Does anybody have any experience trying to rank for any phrase including the word "search"?
