How to know when do use singular vs plural in anchor text and on-page copy?
-
I'm building out a specific section of our site and I want to make sure I target it correctly.
Is there a rule of thumb when to know how to use "car" vs "cars"? (as an example)
Is there a specific way to research the right approach?
thank you!
-
A lot of results for singular/plural and synonyms are so similar as to be nearly identical for the first page or two, which is what really matters, and which is what Gregory Baka is referring to. You will notice a lot of times if you search for something you'll see synonyms and variants bolded in the description and title in the SERPs. That would be your signal that one is being treated as synonymous with (though not "identical to") the other.
In terms of singular vs plural I tend to include both variations naturally within descriptions and on-page copy. External links tend to contain both versions too unless you're buying the anchor text. I would think, based only on common sense and experience, and not any quantifiable study, that Google looks for a natural variation. If you have two different landing pages, one targeting singular and the other targeting plural, that would not only be wasting effort, money, link equity, etc... but it would seem very unnatural. If I were writing an algorithm I'd probably figure out a way to push such pages lower in the results unless other signals point to really high quality at the page and/or domain level.
ALL of this "common sense" stuff flies out the window though when any ambiguity of intent or results is involved. For example, with "cars" you could be talking about the animated movie, which is why you see IMDB, Disney and Wikipedia in the results. This disambiguation factor is why Google is pushing for semantic markup of the web, and is probably why topic modeling has become increasingly important (e.g. want to rank better for "cars" when the user intent is to find the animation, use words like "Pixar" and "Lightening Steve McQueen" in the copy).
As a rule of thumb, I tend to go with whatever sounds better and makes more sense to the user. For example, on a category page I might write "blue widgets" in the title, but I'd use "blue widget" on a single product page. From there I go with what the data says. Looking at Analytics a few months later I pay attention to traffic and keywords as a follow-up. If the "blue widgets" category page gets 80% of it's traffic from a #3 ranking for "blue widget" when it ranks #1 for "blue widgets" that tells me I should probably change the title to the singular version.
In the end I usually find I get the best results when I don't think too hard about it and just go with my gut when writing. I know that's not scientific or anything, but if it works it works.
-
No research. Just memory of doing searches with and without an S for my own keywords and noticing that the results were fairly similar.
I just checked garden and gardens - many of the page 1 results are the same.
Then I checked tool and tools - very different results because of the band "Tool"
Checking garden tool and garden tools takes it back to many similar page 1 results.
The original poster just asked for a Rule of Thumb. So perhaps the answer is "It depends on the keyword. Google it and see what happens."
-
I did a search for "car" vs "cars" and I see a drastically different number of results.
3.3B vs 1.5B, respectively.
Do you have any research to support your response? Just curious where you're getting your information from.
-
When the plural is made by just adding an S, then Google seems not to differentiate the singular or plural. You can verify it by opening two windows and searching for the term both with and without the S and seeing if the results are ranked differently.
But if the plural is a whole different word, like Goose and Geese or Mouse and Mice, then you will definitely have to makes a decision on which to use.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Validated pages on GSC displays 5x more pages than when performing site:domain.com?
Hi mozzers, When checking the coverage report on GSC I am seeing over 649,000 valid pages https://cl.ly/ae46ec25f494 but when performing site:domain.com I am only seeing 130,000 pages. Which one is more the source of truth especially I have checked some of these "valid" pages and noticed they're not even indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19860 -
Should I use the on classified listing pages that have expired?
We have went back and forth on this and wanted to get some outside input. I work for an online listing website that has classified ads on it. These ads are generated by companies on our site advertising weekend events around the country. We have about 10,000 companies that use our service to generate their online ads. This means that we have thousands of pages being created each week. The ads have lots of content: pictures, sale descriptions, and company information. After the ads have expired, and the sale is no longer happening, we are currently placing the in the heads of each page. The content is not relative anymore since the ad has ended. The only value the content offers a searcher is the images (there are millions on expired ads) and the descriptions of the items for sale. We currently are the leader in our industry and control most of the top spots on Google for our keywords. We have been worried about cluttering up the search results with pages of ads that are expired. In our Moz account right now we currently have over 28k crawler warnings alerting us to the being in the page heads of the expired ads. Seeing those warnings have made us nervous and second guessing what we are doing. Does anybody have any thoughts on this? Should we continue with placing the in the heads of the expired ads, or should we be allowing search engines to index the old pages. I have seen websites with discontinued products keeping the products around so that individuals can look up past information. This is the closest thing have seen to our situation. Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated! -Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mellison0 -
How to optimize count of interlinking by increasing Interlinking count of chosen landing pages and decreasing for less important pages within the site?
We have taken out our interlinking counts (Only Internal Links and not Outbound Links) through Google WebMaster tool and discovered that the count of interlinking of our most significant pages are less as compared to of less significant pages. Our objective is to reverse the existing behavior by increasing Interlinking count of important pages and reduce the count for less important pages so that maximum link juice could be transferred to right pages thereby increasing SEO traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Different Header on Home Page vs Sub pages
Hello, I am an SEO/PPC manager for a company that does a medical detox. You can see the site in question here: http://opiates.com. My question is, I've never heard of it specifically being a problem to have a different header on the home page of the site than on the subpages, but I rarely see it either. Most sites, if i'm not mistaken, use a consistent header across most of the site. However, a person i'm working for now said that she has had other SEO's look at the site (above) and they always say that it is a big SEO problem to have a different header on the homepage than on the subpages. Any thoughts on this subject? I've never heard of this before. Thanks, Jesse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Waismann0 -
Link Anchor Text - Best Practice?
Moz - Open Site Explorer using the following setup: Tab: Inbound Links
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
Show: "all"
from: "Only Internal" I have run a number of random tests and have noticed the following results in the link anchor text. [No Anchor Text]
company name
website url
Home
etc. What is the best practice and naming convention to be used? Regards Mark0 -
Merge content pages together to get one deep high quality content page - good or not !?
Hi, I manage the SEO of a brand poker website that provide ongoing very good content around specific poker tournaments, but all this content is split into dozens of pages in different sections of the website (blog section, news sections, tournament section, promotion section). It seems like today having one deep piece of content in one page has better chance to get mention / social signals / links and therefore get a higher authority / ranking / traffic than if this content was split into dozens of pages. But the poker website I work for and also many other website do generate naturally good content targeting long tail keywords around a specific topic into different section of the website on an ongoing basis. Do you we need once a while to merge those content pages into one page ? If yes, what technical implementation would you advice ? (copy and readjust/restructure all content into one page + 301 the URL into one). Thanks Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tit0 -
Varying Internal Link Anchor Text with Each New Page Load
I'm asking for people's opinions on varying internal anchor text. Before you jump in and say, "Oh yes, varying your anchor text is always a good idea", let me explain. I'm not talking about varying anchor text on different links scattered throughout a site. We all know that is a wise thing to do for a variety of reasons that have been covered in many places. What I'm talking about is including semi-useful links below the fold and then varying the anchor text with each page load. Each time Googlebot crawls a page, it sees different anchor text for each link. That way, Googlebot is seeing, for example, 'san diego bars', 'taverns in san diego', 'san diego clubs', and 'pubs in san diego' all pointing to a San Diego bar/tavern/club/pub page. I'm wondering if there is value in this approach. Will it help a site rank well for multiple search queries? Could it potentially be better than static anchor text as it may help Google better understand the targeted page? Is it a good way to protect a large site with a huge number of internal links from Penguin? To summarize, we're talking about the impact of varying the anchor text on a single page with each page load as opposed to varying the anchor text on different pages. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanOD0 -
For a mobile website, is it better to use a 301 vs. a 302 redirect?
We are vetting a vendor for our mobile website and they are recommending using a 302 redirect with rel=canonical vs. a 301 redirect due to 301 caching issues. All the research I've done shows that a 301 is by far the better way to go do to proper indexing, which in turn will enhance our page authority. Thoughts on why a 302 would be a better fit than a 301 on our mobile site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seohdsupply1