The Word In, Really Changes Things Options

[kevs]

In Google I'm coming up #1 for a good search term. But if you add word in, my field + in+ city, I come up 5th.

But the weird thing is that when I cache to see what's going on Google ignores the word in, so I'm a bit at a loss on this.

[Autocrat]

Do we know if " in " is a stop word or not?
If it's making a difference in the results... maybe not?

What hapens for the following;
myfield city
myfield in city
myfield + in city
myfield in + city
"myfield in city"
???

Do you get different results... and if so, how different?
(I thought that the + wasn't necessary - or so people keep telling me... I still use them all the time )

[iamlost]

Dan Thies asks: Stop Words Are Dead! Did I Miss Another Memo?

And Bill Slawski explains why: New Google Approach to Indexing and Stopwords

[kevs]

Forget about +, specially the word 'In"

Now if they are dead, and don't even get cached, why does work in make sure huge difference?

Run some test you will see.

And there isn't much one day to about it? right? add more on work in on page?

[yannis]

IMHO localized indexing kicks in:

field + in+ city

Your pages are not optimized for 'city'. Check on the pages above you and do some research. Adding geo location information might improve your chances.

Yannis

[iamlost]

Now if they are dead, and don't even get cached, why does work in make sure huge difference?

They are dead as STOP words.
What is new is that they NOW ARE being indexed and not discarded. At least in some circumstances.

[kevs]

Yannis, I come up #1 for city without the word in,

I think Iamlost is saying then maybe I would just need more of that word, even though is not even cached.

[SEOigloo]

Kevs -
Did you read Bill's post? (Hey, I can't believe Bill hasn't shown up on this thread!) It's rather big news that Google is attempting to deal with stop words now. As I see it, that means you can optimize for 'in' if you need to, now, and Google will notice it rather than ignoring it.

Miriam

[A.N.Onym]

You need to optimize and build links for "my field" to get shown for your query. That's more competitive, than your city name.

Try "city my field" and see where you are shown. That'd be #1, as far as I can guess.

[bragadocchio]

Did you read Bill's post? (Hey, I can't believe Bill hasn't shown up on this thread!) It's rather big news that Google is attempting to deal with stop words now. As I see it, that means you can optimize for 'in' if you need to, now, and Google will notice it rather than ignoring it.

It does look like Google is paying attention to words that they ignored in the past.

But, chances are good that they are doing some other things now too, so that you might see some other phrases showing up more highly if the search engine things they are relevant.

One of those may be query expansion, where the query term is looked at, and terms that might be related may also be considered when looking for results.

But it is nice to see that when you search for "it was the best of times" (without the quotation marks) that you end up with search results primarily for Dicken's Tale of Two Cities.

Definitely, optimize for the phrases if you can. I think that it's a big step forward that Google now includes stop words in looking for query terms in their databases.

[bwelford]

I believe they always did consider how far apart the chosen keywords were. So stopwords acted as spacers. I'm not seeing anything yet that says that's changed.

[kevs]

Thanks Mariam, I guess they just wont cache it then for the search result.

I just checked and my docment has a lot of in. maybe I need it in title or H1

[yannis]

Google has been indexing 'key phrases' for a long time. Part of 'key phrases' can include 'stop words'.

My guess is that Google uses statistical inferences (Markov Chains?) to determine which 'stop words' to include and which to exclude. Indexing all the 'stop words' would explode the index to something that even Google couldn't afford.

For example searching for a 'kettle of fish' should include the 'of'.

However, 'Of Fish and Men' Google understands that this should be indexed fully as a key-phrase as well as partly without the stop words.

I would take Bill's advice and put keywords into 'key phrases' as much as possible.


Yannis

[kevs]

Funny Yannis, I checked, and the word IN, is represented in my text pretty damn well, yet I'm #1 without IN, and #5 with In, so I don't get it.