Does singular & plural forms affect?

[jen85]

If i have 2 keywords one the singular form & the other plural form. I target these 2 keywords on separate different pages.
Will google treat it as spamming? or
Will it hurt my rankings in any way?

[DaveN]

personally ... yes it is spamming, yes it will hurt your rankings .. as a test you could post the url ;)

DaveN

[dannysullivan]

You should also understand that Google is still the exception I believe among the major search engines in that it will automatically do stemming when you search.

So if someone searches for run, it will also match runs and running, variations of the word run -- words that stem off from the root word run, hence the term stemming.

I haven't tested the others for some time, but neither have I heard them make any stemming announcements.

This means that if you create a page targeting the word "stove," you'd also be targeting the words "stoves." However, you'll still find that generally it is the exact term someone sought that gets preference. In other words, if you didn't use the word "stove" but instead "stoves," you might come up in the listings but be behind hundreds of other matches for the singular form.

What Dave says is right, in that if you make the same page and just change everything from stove to stoves, that's probably spamming territory.

The smart route is to have different content where you use the singular on one and the plural on the other. For example, you might have a page about "Stove Features," where you talk about the features of a particular stove you sell. You'd mostly use the singular form on that page.

Now you've got a completely different page, "Chosing Stoves," where you talk about something different that the features of a particular stove. On this new page, you explain the type of stoves out there and how to make the right choice. On this page, you stick with the plural form.

Now you've got two different, legit pages targeting each form.

[jen85]

It was a very good explaination DannyS.
Like you said, I have 2 different set of content pages for both the singular & plural forms. There is a possiblity that in both these contents, ie. the page where i have targeted the singular phrase might have the plural form of the phrase in the content once & vice-versa...
Should i change it too?

[dannysullivan]

It's not that every reference must only be singular or plural. It's just that each page should be more inclined to one or the other -- most especially in the title tag. If your "plural" page has a few singular references, that's not going to disqualify it from the chances of doing well. In fact, it's more normal that way.

[jen85]

Thnx DannyS.
It was really beneficial & has helped me solve many of my doubts.

[Jill Whalen]

My question would be why do you feel the need to have 2 separate pages targeting the singular and the plural?

It's easy enough to use both forms on one page and will sound/read a whole lot more natural.

I never get when people think they can't put both forms on one page. When you speak or right you sometimes use plurals and sometimes singular, no?


[See, without even thinking about it, I used both the singular form and the plural form of the word "plural" in my post. That's how our language works!]

[jen85]

Yes Jill. It is possible to put both the forms of a word on a single page.
But, don't you think if both these forms have a good count & there are two different pages of content where it can be placed. So, is it not worth doing it like that?

[Jill Whalen]

Absolutely, positively, 100% NO WAY JOSE!

You should be optimizing your pages for many phrases, not just one phrase, and especially not just one form of a phrase.

Any page I've ever seen optimized for one page reads like crap and sounds like spam. Don't do it!

[DaveN]

jill you been looking at my sites again ;)

DaveN

[jen85]

Thanks Jill. I will surely take up on your advice.

[dannysullivan]

I'm going to qualify what Jill's saying. She, of course, can tell me if I need to have my head examined.

Any particular web page will be targeted at two or three different terms. Which terms? What ever terms you put into the title tag of your document. That's because terms in your title tag still remain one of the biggest ways you have to influence your ranking in terms of on-the-page factors.

So let's say you sell cars. You want to want to target those seeking cars. You could have a title like this:

Cars

And page content like this

Looking for cars? The best cars are easy to find with our cars review guide. Whatever cars you seek, the guide has cars lined up in order of mileage, capacity, crash testing and more. Cars, cars, cars! We got your cars!

OK, that's top of my head, but it give you the idea of the unnatural soundingness of this. Too many people understand they need to target a term, so they go overboard on just that term.

Now look at this, first the title:

New Cars Review Guide

And page content:

Below in our new cars review guide, you'll find cars lined up in order of mileage, capacity, crash testing and more. Simply choose the options most important to you, and our car-o-matic technology will bring back choices to consider for your new cars purchase.

OK, a little less cars cars cars in that one, a bit more natural sounding. And what terms are we targeting? Look at the title tag and break it out:

cars
new cars
cars review guide

Now look at the body content, and you'll see we've reinforced the content to use all of those terms at least once. Not overboard, but neither are they absent.

That's what I think Jill is getting at. That page isn't targeted at just one single term. But then again, it's not targeted specifically at a ton of them. There are a few key things you hope it will be found for.

Now on to singular and plural. Jill says it's easy enough to use both forms and target both of them. Sometimes. Let's try it here.

The title:

New Cars Review Guide - Find All Car Options

And some body content:

Below in our new cars review guide, you'll find cars lined up in order of mileage, capacity, crash testing and more. Simply choose the *car* options most important to you, and our car-o-matic technology will bring back choices to consider for your new *car* purchase.

OK, the changes I made are subtle. In the title, I've also added the singular form plus the word options. That means our targeted keyword list grows to:

car
car options
cars
new cars
cars review guide

By the way, I know these are lame choices. I'm not doing any keyword research here. This is all top of the head stuff, so give me some slack :)

Now look at the body copy. I've introduced the singular form of car twice, and it doesn't read like overkill.

In particular, look at the last sentence. Previously, we'd said "new cars purchase" which sounds lame. But I wrote it that way originally to stay in the mind of someone obsessing over making ever single reference be for the plural. In reality, it's better as a singular.

That's an all in one page. The title feels a bit awkward, but it's workable. But in other cases, you might very well find you want to have two different pages, one with only the singular in the title, one with plural. My original advice stands. If you've got substantially different copy, go for that, if the all-in-one approach doesn't work. I'm with Jill that I'd go with that first. The "new cars review guide" might target the singular more while "buying a new car" page might target the plural a bit more. But with thought, both pages might work for both.

[Jill Whalen]

Danny, I mostly agree, but I really do take it further than what you're describing and very much try to target at least 3 very unique phrases, sometimes more. Obviously, you can't target too many in the Title tag, so those are reserved for the more competive of the bunch. But also, I like to have some overlap between pages as well.

So for instance, using your example I might target 3 main phrases such as:

New Car Reviews (which would of course naturally be targeting new car, and car reviews)
Auto Reviews
New Car Review Guide (which would of course also be targeting car review guide, new car review)

It would be a piece of cake for any SEO copywriter worth their salt to write up a good few paragraphs that targeted those phrases. In fact, I'd probably suggest that we'd want to target a few of the main types of car reviews, such as "Toyota Reviews" (which ever couple of them happened to be the most searched upon).

That would make it even easier to write this home page, and in doing so, we'd link into the actual Toyota Reviews page (which would itself focus on a variety of Toyota Models).

So I might target 5 full out unique phrases on the home page, but then an inner page will be more on target for one of those, plus a few more of its own. Probably only 3 or those phrases would be my main target, but the other two would be my "bonus" phrases. (Ever notice in your stats that your home page often gets traffic from tons of phrases? If it's not, you're doing something wrong.)

I really do think that one of the biggest mistakes that SEOs have been making in the 10+ years I've been doing this is trying to target just one phrase on a page. Those are the pages that Google has figured out how to easily devalue, and I'm sure they will continue to do so.

[This is somewhat off the whole singular vs. plural lesson, but in a way it's a similar discussion.]

[berneboy]

Hi!

I just happend to read this thread and I found it interesting. (the day before xmas and all :D )
Do any of you know if google is any good at stemming in other languages than english?.

I have seen some examples of it in swedish, but only very few.

Merry Christmas all!

[Jill Whalen]

Now for something a little more off topic:
I also have some questions regarding differencies between filters and "automatic bans" (if there is such a term ) across different languages (ie swedish and english or other languages).

Danny's on a thread splitting tear right now...you may want to post this in another thread. (I'd move it if I could, but alas, I have no privledges here!) :D

[berneboy]

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