Google Mystery

[vintagedge]

I have a mystery that I hope someone can shed some light on.

I have a site that sells vintage style t-shirts. For the search term vintage t-shirts our site is ranked 68 out of 1,600,000. For the search term vintage t our site ranks 9 out of 8,120,000.

The thing that confuses me is that when you look at the listing for vintage t the highlighted words (search term) are actually the words vintage t-shirts but Google is reading only part of the hyphenated word.

If there are less sites (1,600,000) showing up for vintage t-shirts it doesn't make a lot of sense to me why we would be ranked that much lower.

Does anyone have any explanation why this would be?

vintagedge