How Do Search Engines Handle Singular vs. Plural?

[The Expert]

Does anyone have any insight on how much the search engines differentiate between singular versions of a keyword vs plural?

Example would be paint ball gun niche.

Most likely, people searching for paint ball guns are going to search for the plural form of the keyword vs. the singular (paint ball gun) as they are pretty much looking for an online catalog that they can browse through many different choices.

However, when setting up an e-commerce niche site, it doesn't make sense to title each product in the plural. (i.e. "Tippman All-Pro Paintball Guns")

So the j'st of my question is, if you are looking to rank for the plural version of a keyword, but you need to put multiple singular versions of the keyword in as titles, are you going to rank for both plural & singular or would you start ranking for just the singular version...which is a term that is searched for less?

[Intrepreneur]

I was testhing this with the word strategy.

It appears for that word they prefer strategies over strategy.

I'm sure from that basic test it's enough to guess wht they think of other non-plural versus plural words.

[paulgl]

Strategy and strategies is a novel test, as they are completely
different spellings. I think in that case it would matter which one is
better. Would a search engine automatically include strategy
if one searched for strategies? I'm sure one would have 'strategy'
on the page many times as well, but the keyword strategies is
very dissimilar to strategy.

I think if one searched for red ball, then maybe red balls would show
up. If they searched "red ball" I think "red balls" would still show
up as red ball is in it. Is this assumption wrong?
Is it the same for searched without quotes?

I've always liked threads like this as they open up other
questions, like the difference between
buying cars
and
buying a car

Paul

[The Expert]

I'm thinking that they tie closely related plurals to their singular variants.

When I search for "Air Rifle" and "Air Rifles" I'm served up pretty much the same results.

[FlashDriveDT]

I used to think like most here and when I began with my blog I used only plurals, in the title tag as well as body. Because I figured that way I would score for both the singular and plural keyword.

To my surprise, I think I was wrong about this! It's been about 5 months now and while I rank pretty well for the plurals I rank MUCH lower on the singular. The product we're talking about here are specific tech gadgets. So in pauls example, I would advise to target "red xy ball" instead of "xy red balls" (xy=brand).

As another surprise I found out via google's adwords keyword tool that most people search for the singular in that type of example instead of the plural. When you think about it that makes sense. I'm sure most people only want to buy ONE xy red ball instead of a bulk of them (yeah, I know bummer). Chances are that even if they want buy many they still only type the singular. But again, I think this is only in the case of specific brand products. Not for general products like "balls" or "red balls".

So starting tomorrow I will revamp my SEO titles and keyword placing, changing them to singular for the most cases. The interesting question then is: Can one use singular and still score for the plural? Is it possible to use something like "XY red ball(s)" in the title tag and google recognizing that for both variants? Or would google rather frown upon that? Are there other wording/spelling tricks one could use?

[JohnS]

I think it also depends on how much Google trusts your site. I have a high PR site that Google automatically changes the singular to the plural for in the search results (even bolding the plural form of the word in the title). Other sites of mine do not do this.

If I was just starting out, I would check the search volume of singular vs. plural with the Google Keyword tool - using "exact match" (very important).

[FlashDriveDT]

Originally Posted by JohnS

I think it also depends on how much Google trusts your site. I have a high PR site that Google automatically changes the singular to the plural for in the search results (even bolding the plural form of the word in the title). Other sites of mine do not do this.

What do you mean with automatically changing and bolding the plural? Do your titles have the singular or plural?

If I was just starting out, I would check the search volume of singular vs. plural with the Google Keyword tool - using "exact match" (very important).

Absolutely. Unfortunately in my naivety I structured my site with plurals only, just to find out later that it's the singular that's being searched more.

[Intrepreneur]

Originally Posted by BrenneM

I think Paul is correct in his comparison between the singular and plural of balls. Strategy and strategies are probably picked up as two different words. We should probably be more concerned with word formation, rather than definition.

But they aren't as I already said ;-)

[MaxReferrals]

I know from our own testing, that natural rank 100% differs.

For example, we optimize for:

luggage tags
luggage tag

G ranks and holds rank for "luggage tags."

But we won't rank for "luggage tag." Weird. Why?

Does Google see luggage tag as a duplicate keyword, since "tag" is part of "tags"?

Anyone know why?

[franchiseshop]

Bing.com is annoying in the way that, example: If you search for "Franchises" it will auto bring up results for "franchise" and "franchises"

"Results are included for franchise. Show just the results for franchises."

As my site is well optimised for the plural this puts me down the Bing results by several places.

Bing is very new so it's an interesting point to know, all be it you are really optimising for Google and not Bing/Yahoo/Ask.

Google does not care eaither way, however I would have thought they would have lumped the two together as they are so similar but this is not the case, I can swing 10 places for plural/singular which is quite annoying as it means optimising for 2 very similar keywords.