Google's John Mueller discusses synonyms and search results and explains how context of the whole query is important
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John Mueller answered a question about why a site that ranked for one keyword phrase didn’t rank for what they said was a synonym for the same phrase. John answered the question in general terms, explaining how what’s important is the full context of the search query.
Synonyms and Search Results
Before Google Hummingbird Google generally ranked sites by matching keywords in the search query to keywords in a web page.
After the Google Hummingbird update Google swapped out some important words in the query with synonyms without actually changing the meaning of the search query. The advantage of doing that was that now Google could find even more web pages to rank, some of which were even better than pages with the exact keyword match.
This technique is called Query Expansion.
Today Google does more than query expansion in order to rank web pages and as Mueller’s answer shows, some of that is generally focused on what users mean when they use a search query in order to understand the full context of the search query.
The person asking the question was confused because they expected a page that ranked for one keyword phrase to rank for a synonym version of that phrase. But it didn’t...
Read Full Story: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-search-results-and-synonyms/442301/
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