Maybe some of you folk can shed some insight on something that is confusing me. If you type in the phrase "rubies of eventide quests" in google and hit search, it comes back with And one search result. But, if you search for "rubies eventide quests" you get different results. Further complicate this by my site ranking #4 for "rubies eventide quests" and #14 for "rubies of eventide quests". I was in the top ten last week for "rubies of eventide quests" but dropped 9 places over the weekend. Googles cache has not updated in a while and my meta keywords do have the stopwords in them. I did take out my google ads this weekend to see how they affected load times and haven't put them back so that may be what slammed my ranking with google. Now, none of this would be a problem .. except .. people who find my site from a search engine do so by looking for "rubies of eventide quests" and other similar terms. Nobody has ever hit my site after searching for "rubies eventide quests". So, I am wondering. Why does google say they are ignoring the "of" in the search phrase when they really aren't, and more importantly, why do I rank better if I type the search phrase without the stopword. It is boggling my poor brain.
I have noticed the same thing with focused keyphrases I use. (no specifics come to mind at present). or even with the order of the words changed in the search. The funny thing is - in the past I have ranked better sometimes for all the 'words' in a phase all mixed up than I did for the phrase as it appears on the page. IE page optimized for keyphrase "A B C" Search - Rank "A B C" - 7 "A C B" - 3 "A C" - 2 It may have a lot to do with the competition you have for a specific term. in my case the "A B C" must be a term that has more direct competition than "A C B" but back to YOUR circumstances - maybe Google searches for the 'Phrase' IF it doesn't contain stop words...if Google has to remove the 'of' then it cuts up the 'phrase' in to 'words' or the word 'rubies' + the phrase 'eventide quests' which would return different results than a direct search iof the exact phrase 'rubies eventide quests' This is just an idea - I'll let the expert G-lovers set us strait.