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Checking the stats I see someone has come to my b&b site from the search "Italy and culture" (without the quotations) which appears at the very top. A search for "Italy culture" (again without the quotations) does not produce the same results. In fact my site appears at 97 for such a search.
Google says "The 'AND' operator is unnecessary" because they include all the terms by default. But these results are very different. Does anybody know what role the word "and" plays here and why it brings my site to number one when otherwise it appears at 97?
My best guess is that the "and" works as a spacer, therefore identifying pages where there is definately a word or words between the words "italy" and "culture".
A search using the quotes for "italy culture" brings the same results as a search without using the quotes, suggesting that the search without the quotes identifies that phrase.
A search for "italy and culture" using quotes however produces different results from a search without the quotes, which means of course it searched for the exact phrase in the quotes.
The real question here of course is why the "and" in the search without quotes produces different results from "italy culture" without quotes?
I may be wrong, but I believe google gives priority to word combinations, yet if you have "and" between words (as many people do when searching) then google assigns priority to the words WITHOUT the exact phrase being at the top of the algorithm.
Obviously it's important to know how people search (will they search for "italy culture" or "italy and culture"?) as well as how google responds to those queries.
I would bet that people would search for "Italian culture" and "Italy and culture".
You can substitute nearly any filter word you like for the "and" and the results won't change.
Obviously it's important to know how people search
If you check through WebmasterWorld site search, you will find a number of discussions about how paople search.
If you try various searches you will find that all so called "ignored" words do affect the SERPS on Google (and, the, of, on... etc)
As the search strings get longer it gets more difficult to get stats as to what people use, as fewer are searching.
In your case, I would have thought that the "B&B witgetland" search term was more important than the "culture widgetland". And if you look at Google serps, you will see that "b and b widgetland" gives different results to "b & b widgetland" or from "b&b widgetland". This may be a more profitable area to concentrate your research on for a B&B business.
What I AM interested in is UNDERSTANDING WHY the use of "and" in the search phrase produces different results in Google than without it.
As I mentioned before it seems to work as a spacer of sorts, producing the same results for searches that have another stop word in between (Italy THE culture, Italy IN culture, Italy WHERE culture etc.)
Any ideas?
