Thought provoking discussion on perfect synonym keywords

[James77]

This is just a general theoretical discussion to provoke some thought.

Suppose I have a 2 synonym keywords - which mean identical things.

EG - "Golf Holiday" "Golf Break" - probably you can think of better ones, but you get the idea.

On the following assumptions:

• Google knows these synonyms have identical meaning.
• Google want to provide the searcher with the "best possible result set".
• By definition there can only be 1 "best possible results set"

If the above is true, then Google should produce identical result sets for either of these terms - **So why don't they?  **

[CPLDistribution]

Possibly because the CTR would be lower if the title tags and meta descriptions included synonyms rather than the original search phrase.

Even though the searcher will most likely know the synonyms mean the same thing they may have a tendency to click on the results that use the language that they use.

[RyanKent]

Even when phrases have the same meaning, there can be different reasons to prefer one phrase over the other. An exact match will (and in my opinion should) be given preference.

The phrase could be a name of a movie or book or be contained in a speech. Ultimately a decision needs to be made on how the results will be offered and this is what SEs (not just Google) have determined is most helpful to users.

I would guess Google would offer a relevancy rating to each phrase. I can see how "Golf Holiday" and "Golf Break" could be used to refer to the same thing, but I would suggest the relevancy of those two particular phrases is a bit low. A person could work 4 hours in the morning, then take a "Golf Break" and hit 9 holes, then return to work. I wouldn't refer to that as a "Golf Holiday".

An example of terms with higher relevancy would be "mobile phone" and "cell phone". I would suggest that 95%+ of the time these words mean exactly the same thing. But you still have to give people credit for exact name matches with domain names, titles, etc above those who use the second form of the phrase. There often is a reason a user chose the phrase they did and could prefer an exact match.