Don't know if it's my geographical area, but results for 3/4 word keyphrases are a bit of a laugh. The cache of pages returned show some keywords allright, but the phrases are nowhere to be found.
bobmark
4:12 pm on Sep 29, 2002 (gmt 0)
join the club, glengara. There's a lot of discussion of the "3 keyword effect" on other threads.
glengara
4:51 pm on Sep 29, 2002 (gmt 0)
I'd noticed them Bobmark, but other points suggestions and theories kept interupting! Still a bit of a mystery, I take it?
bobmark
5:10 pm on Sep 29, 2002 (gmt 0)
yes, though I think there are a couple of things fairly clear: the effect is mostly on 3 word keyphrases it is not evenly distributed but seems to be operable for certain words - perhaps the type of words you use in a meta "classification" tag. In several cases people reported ranking the same for "blue fuzzy" as they did last month but fell off the map for "blue fuzzy widgets" and were knocked off by less relevant, possibly spammy sites that only matched 1 or 2 of the 3 keywords in the phrase. I actually have a quite nice example of the specificity. I redid my index page title and Googlebot spidered it 2 days ago. As of now I am doing great on the 3 keyword phrase using the old 2 plus the new keyword I added to my title. Nothing has changed regarding the dreaded "widgets" keyword though. I gather since you mentioned geographic area you are using a "country keyword1 keyword2" phrase. In my case on that type of search a number of the sites that have displaced previously top 10 sites relevant for a country specific search are not even from the country and have the most minimal content from the country (like a single page). subway noted real problems with geo-specific 3 word searches on another thread.
