Amazing how different people read different things into the same words. It seems pretty clear to me: Google says the "and" (and maybe the "on") are not necessary and won't make any difference. But when you search on "advice tips
SEO" you get one set of results, and when you search on "advice and tips on
SEO" you get a different set. And yes, that's without putting the sentence in parentheses so it is seached as a whole. So, empirically, adding or removing the stop words does make a difference to the results, contrary to what Google says. Paul is correct.
Semadvance, he did not say take out significant search terms, such as Michigan, he said take out stop words only. Of course you'll get different results if you take out prime terms.
While I have nowhere near the ability or experience of Semadvance, I also wouldn't be taking Wordtracker and Overture as the oracle of phrases. They by & large don't like any phrase over 4 words, and right now if you search on "advice on
SEO" on wordtracker there are no results, but 17.9 per day on overture. Stake your marketing and company's future on that sort of result? No thanks.
All this has nothing to do with whether the phrase advice and tips on
seo is a good target phrase, but I don't see anywhere in the thread that Paul suggested it was. He did suggest that if you are targeting a phrase then the stop words do make a difference, and he wondered how most people searched.
Google returns 177,000 pages for "advice tips on
SEO", and 210,000 for "advice and tips on
SEO". Would seem to me that Google sees a difference between the two ways to enter that particular search. The person who took Google's own advice would have come up with 33,000 fewer options for their search - in other words, dropping the operator "and" lost about 16% of the results. And the first page has changed, which is most important. Maybe it got rid of some of those phrases such as ...."and fruit cake advice, tips on
seo, and car repair." Or whatever. Seems a good thing to me.
Seems to me that no matter how you cut it, Paul is right. I'm sure he'll accept apologies sent on a nice bottle of anejo rum in time for Xmas.