How Google Treats Synonyms

In an article entitled: «Helping computers understand language«Steve Baker (Google Search Engineer) talks about how Google treats synonyms.

Synonyms are an essential part of almost all languages and often depend on the context in which they are used to define their meaning, the goal of search engines is to give the best possible result to their users without them having to stop use natural language.

Engineers have been improving the search algorithm's synonym system for several years, a tip from Matt Cutts is that we write naturally using several synonyms when expressing ourselves, since Google recognizes that we are talking about the same thing ... we must avoid the keyword stuffing that was so common until recently.

As I had already said in another article, the density of keywords is already something worthless and outdated, the important thing now is the context and quality of the article.

From these types of articles we can see that Google intends to invest heavily in this factor to improve the quality of results, in fact it has been doing so for some time, if we want to achieve good long-term results, it is best to think more about the client and less on the robot.

You can see Matt Cutts' article here: More info about synonyms at Google.