Major white hat observations please confirm!

Hey everyone planning on doing a really good post after this but first I need someone who knows SEO very well to confirm my google algorithim hypothesis. On with it man... Anyway thanks to a new program (I wont give names thats not what this post is about) I am able to get a very high observation on what my keywords are doing along with competition. So after looking at the link profiles with this software of my competition I noticed that some of the competeting profiles for a specific keyword were way better than #1 ranking for that same keyword.

For example:

#1 guy for keyword "x" has a few things like keyword in title, and desc. No dmoz or yahoo directory. (backlinks)like 3 pr 2's 1 pr 3 and 3 pr 1's and about 400 pr 0's.

# 6 guy for keyword "x" has a bit more going for him with keyword in title,url,desc,and tags. Additionally listed in Dmoz and yahoo and link profile is much better with almost triple the numbers of the pr's (backlinks)listed above in #1 spot in addition to a few pr 4's (backlinks) that the #1 spot did not have.

So I thought ok the guy#1 has more of the keyword in the content so thats why he is ranking better, not so control+f listed only 3 listings of the keyword on the page. So I went and checked out #6 guy and he has about the same only 3 listings of the keyword on the competing page. So this really bothered me for a bit and then I realized something.......(this is the meat of this post so pay attention everything else is backstory!!!) If my keyword is a longtail keyword then google will break up the nouns and adjetives in the longtail keyword phrase and search the page for individual components of the keyword on the page. When I checked this for sure #1 guy had blown everyone out of the water on the components of the keyword!!! I'm talking everyone 1-10 rank on google. Now this may be old info for someone out there I just wanted to confirm with this community because you guys know your ish. Anyway please confirm if this is new info or if you have known this all along. The reason this is important to me is because I don't have to worry about using the exact keyword while writing content. This makes the flow of the content much better in turn higher quality content which is the most important factor to me!!!!!

your right it is an old rule - when google searches for a keyword like

"cheap city apartments"

it looks at the density of each of the words.

"cheap"
"city"
"apartments"

and also the density of different word orders

"cheap apartments"
"city apartments"
"cheap city"
"apartments cheap"

ETC

thanks just thought it was a cool discovery on my own I was sure it had been well documented.

Did you check out the anchor text variations of the backlinks of each of the serp positions?that is important too.May be the first serp has lot of backlinks with the target anchor text.that is why its ranking.

if you read the recent patent google put up it confirms this and adds a little more to your observations

surfacing said:

if you read the recent patent google put up it confirms this and adds a little more to your observations

Click to expand...

I would love to see a link to this patent from Google... if you got it.... Thanks

Old rule for some, but New for Other.
Thanks OP

surfacing said:

if you read the recent patent google put up it confirms this and adds a little more to your observations

Click to expand...

whodi said:

I would love to see a link to this patent from Google... if you got it.... Thanks

Click to expand...

Me too

Very interesting. I always thought it was looking at keywords that were similar and connected. This could be why you want to check your entire site for the density of all the key words.

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=20080040316.PGNR.&OS=dn/20080040316&RS=DN/20080040316 patent was applied for in '04 and published in '08. I think that may be it. I've recently started writing for a whitehat mega-site using different verb conjugations and synonyms, hoping to bump my rankings. It's been 8 months, 90 original articles. If I don't rank for my keywords this way, I'm wiping my ass with my grey hat and going over to the dark side.

Here is another article on the patent.

http://www.brafton.com/industry-news/google-patents-new-algorithm-provide-pattern-recognizing-search-results-$1338538.htm