Google exclusion words.

I posted this a few days ago in response to an unrelated topic, so I expect it may have gone unnoticed. As the situation appears to be continuing I thought I'd seek out the views of the cognoscente.


"During the last few days we have noticed the word "to" (which it claims not to include in its search anyway) has been erraticly dropping in position in some our key searches.

Example, "flights to barcelona", "barcelona flights" and flights barcelona" have had no.1 positions for some months. "flights to barcelona" has over the last few days been postioned anywhere between 6 and 25, whilst "flights barcelona" remains at no.1

The page titles have not been changed. Has anyone else noticed this?

: If this is not a new phenomen how do you experts out there optimise for words that Google tells the searcher are excluded when including/excluding these words appears to make such a big difference in the delivered search results."[/quote]

apicius - the stopword "to" is not used to produce results, i.e. it is not checked against the pages in the index but it does affect the proximity of the terms searched for, which Google takes into account.

A search for flights to barcelona gives a proximity of 11 characters between the f of flights and the b of barcelona. A search for flights barcelona obviously gives less. That is why different SERPs are produced.

Gringo.