It's one thing to understand it, but does it mean the same thing to Google in terms of ranking the page?

Let's say you have two pages that are exactly the same except for the page title:

"best haircuts calgary - where to get them?"

"where in calgary to get the best haircuts"

Duplicate content aside, do you think Google would rank one of those higher than the other for the query "best haircuts calgary", or rank them the same?

Can you break up a search query across a sentence and have Google still recognize which query you are targeting?

Let's say I'm trying to rank a page for the phrase "best haircuts calgary".

Is Google's algorithm advanced enough to look at page title "Best Haircuts - Where To Get Them In Calgary" and know it's targeting the query "best haircuts calgary"?

If it can't do this right now, I could see it advancing to this at some point in the future, which would then change the game quite a bit in terms of how creative you can get creating pages for queries.

Great thanks a lot Paul!

Those search volumes were just made up, although I did see something similar with my research.  Once I decide what I'm going to do I'll let you know what I've decided.

Thanks again!

Hey Paul,

Thanks for the in depth response, that makes a lot of sense.  Perhaps you can answer my next question...

I've received monthly search volume from Google's Keyword Planner tool on a bunch of keywords.  With this tool I returned search volume within Calgary as a filter.  Some of these keywords include the word Calgary.  For example lets say I have two keywords that look promising...

• calgary shoe repair - 1000 searches / month , low competition
• shoe repair - 750 searches / month , low competition

Both of these search volumes only include searches in Calgary.  Am I correct in assuming I can choose both "calgary shoe repair" and "shoe repair" as two separate keywords?  Or would it be wise to only choose one of the two?

I understand Google's local search automatically searches keywords with the location you are searching from.   For example if I'm searching from Calgary and query "best shoe repair", Google knows I'm searching from Calgary and presents Calgary based results.

I'm using Google's new Keyword Planner tool which allows for city based search results, meaning I don't have to include "Calgary" in the keywords I submit.

The question I have is should I be attaching "Calgary" to my keywords for on-page optimization, and why or why not?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Yeah that makes sense.  I also have a lot of experience with databases and the back ends of websites so I know your language.

I'm wondering how Google correlates the url with the page entries then. Maybe each page entry would have a url field so Google knows the location of the live version to constantly update that entry in the "page directory" database?

That makes sense, thanks for getting back to me so fast!

Perhaps you can help answer my next question.  I have a client who used to host his domain at "www.oldurl.com", and has migrated his website to "www.newurl.com".  He wants to use his old domain "www.oldurl.com", so he setup forwarding/masking so that when someone tries to access "www.oldurl.com" they are forwarded to "www.newurl.com" but the url shown to the user is "www.oldurl.com".

My client want his old url "www.oldurl.com" to be ranked in Google, but from what I understand his new url will be ranked.  I know masking is really bad for SEO, and I want to educate my client as to why on the technical side.  I have read Google see's all the content as duplicate with masking.  Do you know the details as to why?

Hey Cesar,

Thanks for the links!  Really useful info there.

Unfortunately they I couldn't find the answer I was looking for so I'll be more specific in what I'm asking.

From what I understand Google uses two database systems.   One contains keywords and the other contains cached pages.  How does a keyword entry point to a page entry?  Does it use a unique id number, or does it use the url that page is using in the "live" vesion on the web?

Thanks for the response and links Takeshi.  Maybe I can rephrase the question to be more clear. Let's say a piece of content (or page) is at the url "www.oldurl.com/page".  During a migration this same piece of content now at the url "www.newurl.com/page".   The "www.oldurl.com" doesn't exist anymore so there isn't duplicate content in the live web.

Would Google create a new entry in it's "page directory" (what is the industry standard name for this directory?) and give it the url "www.newurl.com/page"?

If it does create a new entry, would Google keep the old entry "www.oldurl.com/page" although the old url doesn't exist in the "live" web anymore?

This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific:

1. Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory")
2. Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page
3. Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched.  These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords.
4. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory"
5. These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm

The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory".  The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls.   Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)?

For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache?

The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.

Great thanks a lot Paul!

Those search volumes were just made up, although I did see something similar with my research.  Once I decide what I'm going to do I'll let you know what I've decided.

Thanks again!