Carried over from this thread in the Technical forum where meandering discussion is not allowed. Probably need to read that one first for this one to make any sense.
Did some more searching today and search is definitely including "grove" when the keyword is "orchard". And vice versa. This is true all across the MP, not just in wedding invitations. A search for [orchard wedding invitations] brings up the same 13K+ results as [grove wedding invitations] and in the exact same order up to about the 25th result on page one. After that, you still see all the same items but their order is slightly shifted here and there. Same with the roughly 3K results searching either [orchard wall art] or [grove wall art]. Same product results, the order is just slightly shifted the further into them you get.
In looking at the results, the majority I clicked on had [grove] somewhere in the tags, title, or template text but did not use [orchard] anywhere. Those that used [orchard] were mostly vintage fruit shipping labels or designs in that vein. (Which makes sense since that's actually the difference - an orchard is a grove specifically made up of fruit/nut trees.) I'm sure they're out there but of the results I clicked on, not a one used BOTH [orchard] and [grove] in their tags. Interesting.
If your design includes, say, a bunch of elm trees, you wouldn't use [orchard] as a tag as it's then technically incorrect. However, if you can rightfully use [orchard] as a tag then [grove] is also a very legit tag. And although [grove] definitely proves to be the more popular word here (maybe it just sounds more pleasant/romantic than orchard?), I didn't find any result where the designer thought to use both. Huh. So I guess what I am thinking is, don't overlook synonyms in your tags, guys. That one word could be the difference in getting found or not. (In this case of orchard/grove, search picks up either for either, but that's an anomaly.)
But the main thing I am thinking now is -
what other word pairs might be out there that Z search is treating the same way?
The other part of this is place-holder template text being included in search. I'm sure Z has a good reason for letting that happen but it definitely mucks up results with completely irrelevant designs. I think most of it is innocent but at the same time I think some have caught on to this and use it to advantage. It's like getting extra tags in your listing and you can't be called out for tag-spam if they're irrelevant because hey, 1st Street or Christmas Lane or Coconut Grove are just parts of my sample template text ....
The thing about synonyms, just as you noted, Col, is that they're similar but are often not interchangeable.
And in a case like @Anne , her actual orchard designs get crowded out in the results by the more popular keyword, grove, even when the searcher specifically uses orchard not grove. Frustrating for the designer and not helpful for the customers who really do want just orchard related stuff.
