— Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Jessie Stricchiola, and Rand Fishkinproximity search uses the order of the search phrase to find related documents. For example, when you search for “sweet German mustard” you are specifying only a precise proximity match. If the quotes are removed, the proximity of the search terms still matters to the search engine, but it will now show documents whose contents don’t exactly match the order of the search phrase, such as Sweet Mustard — German.
Replicated under Fair Use from The Art of SEO (Theory in Practice) by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Jessie Stricchiola, and Rand Fishkin.