Keyword order relevant?

[juko]

Hello,

I run a small site for an orchestra.
www.juko-stuttgart.de
It is quite astonishing that the site is listed #1 for the search town orchestra.
However it is only #31 for orchestra town.
Is the order of the keywords relevant for Google?
I thought it does not matter.

Could someone clarify this?
Thanks in advance

[Will.Spencer]

You appear to have answered your own question!

[leo]

The question aims deeper than is obvious at the first glance: I have made similar experiments and got the impression, that G! tries to make "sense" of the KW sequence. There seems to be a data base which determines whether a particular word and combinations of this word with others is a frequently used search item and if so, it ranks the combinations different from a less frequently used combination of the same words. Only if the words convey the same "meaning" - or better: if they are used with equal frquency - then ranking is independent of word order. This finding is, by the way, supported by jukos posting. A town orchestra is certainly more frequently searched for than an orchestra town.

[T0PS3O]

This finding is, by the way, supported by jukos posting. A town orchestra is certainly more frequently searched for than an orchestra town.

Big assumption!

Orchestra town is to my believes searched more often but... With the word 'in' in between. ("in" is a very common word and was not included in your search. - G) Thus becoming orcestra town instead of orchestra IN town.

It does depend though on what they are looking for. If the search for a known orchestra, for instance London Orchestra then yes that will be the likely order. If however they search for any odd orchestra in a town then I think they will seach Orchestra in Town X.

A search query, and especially for not so savvy searchers, is often an answer to the question - What are you looking for? Answer: Orchestra in London.

Just my experience/findings.

[juko]

Thanks for your answers.
So one could say that what Google does is a combination of exact matching like when you search for "word1 word2" in quotation marks and a loose matching of all the given keywords, right ?

Thanks again.

[leo]

Sorry - there was a misunderstanding from my part: when I wrote "orchestra town" I really meant that and not "orchestra <town>" (with town a variable to be replaced by a town's name). So - tops30 is certanly right with his remarks.

I wonder whether writing "orchestra in <town>" would not help to prevent the suppression of "in".

[T0PS3O]

I'm not too sure myself on what they mean with 'not included'. It is stored in their cache and it is used for exact matches so perhaps it might help using that little word in titles etc. but then there will be those argueing it will dilute the strength of the other words.

Tough one.

[digitalpoint]

Keyword order is definitely relevant... Try it with any multi-word search on Google, and you will always get completely different results by mixing the words around.

[nohaber]

Keyword order is absolutely important. I don't have time to search it, but it is explicitly written in google's site.

[compar]

I agree with Shawn. I was totally surprised that anybody ever consider otherwise. Certainly Google will return pages that contain all the keywords but not necessarily in the exact order or in continous phrases, but they don't give them all the same ranking.

In the example you are giving it seems to me that the two versions of the keywords you mention have potentially significantly different meanings. Google wouldn't be doing their job if they think both of these terms have the same relevance for your site.