Repeat After Me (Give Keywords Weights in Google)

booleanstrings Boolean 3 Comments

It was not the case 10-15 years ago, but now, Google pays attention if you repeat a keyword or a key phrase. Repeating, in theory, should not be necessary; you would expect the same results if Google followed formal Boolean logic and displayed “all” results. However, Google puts some informal “thinking” into the string interpretation, so:

  1. If you repeat a keyword, and the number of results is under 100-200, Google will change the order of the results. It will prioritize pages with a “stronger” presence of the keyword (whatever that means)
  2. If you repeat a keyword, and the number of results is over 300-400, Google will also present you with a different set of results (!)
  3. As a bonus, you also will see the repeated word in the snippets more often.

Examples are easy to come by.

So, alter your strings by repeating keywords, and possibly, the word order, and you are off to collect thousands of profiles from X-Ray.

Do not miss the upcoming Talent Sourcing Bootcamp – July 6-8. We will cover “everything” sourcing. (Only a few spots are left at this time.)

Comments 3

  1. Hi there,

    Not sure if this was intentional, but if you drop the double “i” from “iibm” in your 3rd example, results jump from 170 to 2m. Is the suggestion to also add variations of spellings?

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  2. Pingback: Shaping Snippets for Scraping | Boolean Strings

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