Just recently I have noticed while running several tests on the major search engines and their ability to server and rank site via proximity searches. I first started to see the trend a month or so ago. I was trying to rank a site for “Michigan Green Plumbing” to assist with the certification process for the company to become more green.

First, let’s define what proximity searches are: (via Wikipedia)

a proximity search looks for documents where two or more separately matching term occurrences are within a specified distance, where distance is the number of intermediate words or characters. In addition to proximity, some implementations may also impose a constraint on the word order, in that the order in the searched text must be identical to the order of the search query. Proximity searching goes beyond the simple matching of words by adding the constraint of proximity and is generally regarded as a form of advanced search.

For example, a search could be used to find “Michigan green plumber”, and match phrases such as “Michigan green plumbing”. By limiting the proximity, these phrases can be matched while avoiding documents where the words are scattered or spread across a page or in unrelated articles in an anthology.

While conducting my testing I have noticed several issues with proximity searches within the three major engines. The target site ranks for the desired search term “Michigan Green  Plumbing” and Michigan Green Plumber” in both Google and Yahoo. Bing has the main indifference out of the three.

Tagging – The site is tagged via the title tag and targeted body copy to compensate for the term “Michigan Green Plumbing”

Again while this works to be in close proximity to “Michigan Green Plumbers” both Google and Yahoo rank the site accordingly and Bing only references the site for the exact term.

Google – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumbing

Google – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumber

Yahoo – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumbing

Yahoo – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumber

Bing – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumbing

Bing – #1 Position for Michigan Green Plumber

In conclusion when targeting proximity searches it is an acceptable best practice to include them into your research for both Google and Yahoo, but when it comes to Bing stick to the old fashion techniques for each and every targeted keyword on you list.

Will this trend disappear with the merger of Bing and Yahoo? Or will Yahoo results be close minded to proximity search terms?