Do search engines treat plurals and singular the same?

[NewDeal]

Hello,

Can I use widgets and get credit for widget in the SEO of my pages?

Ex 1. For the finest widgets, look to widget world.
Ex 2. It's easy to see that our new widget is above the rest.

In these examples would I get credit for widet in both sentences or only one?

Peace,

Andrew

[mona]

Hi, Andrew and welcome to WebmasterWorld. The technical name for whether a search engine can understand that a plural and singular word are similar is called "stemming". ( just as an fyi :)

Google uses stemming in there algorithm, MSN and Yahoo do not. So you will get credit for both plural and singular with Google, but not the others.