Does Google Have A Problem With An Apostrophe?

[HuskyPup]

After several months of racking our heads for what possibly may be penalised with a web site, the current conclusion is that Google does not like the company name with an apostrophe since whenever we try and search for even the company name of "example's" Google always suggests, do you mean "examples"?

When entering "example's company" it returns the site as #1 yet asks do you mean "examples company" and when accepting that it returns the site as #1 with site links!

It's a ten year old site and has never had any problem until May this year when it lost about 40% of its overall traffic and has never recovered.

Yahoo! and Live both get the site correct and ranked well.

Has anyone else experienced this situation or are we going to have to accept that the company is now called "examples" solely for Google?

[Robert Charlton]

Google will often return alternate spelling suggestions, even when your spelling is correct. The alternates come, I would assume, both from searcher stats which Google tracks, and from alternate usage on the web. It's probable that web usage drops the apostrophe. I've seen this in lots of keyword research I've done which has involved possessive adjectives (eg, men's vs mens, women's vs womens).

In your case, your Sitelinks without the apostrophe could suggest that you have a stronger inbound link "vote" without the apostrophe than you do with the apostrophe. Possibly, even one very strong link without the apostrophe might have done it. This is conjecture. It could also be that Google has made some kind of algo change with regard to apostrophes, or maybe to its stemming.

I'd think of this purely as a spelling situation. Some years back, I optimized a site where misspellings throughout the web (ie, both searches and occurrences on other sites) of the main product name were about three or four times more common than correct spellings. We had no choice but to go along with usage and target both. With a company name, that can be awkward. It might be enough to include a few misspellings on your page.

I'm not understanding where your drop in traffic comes, as you're indicating that you come up #1 for both... and it's likely that both are used in searching for your company name.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:13 pm (utc) on Sep. 11, 2008]

[HuskyPup]

I'm not understanding where your drop in traffic comes,

Quite simply for all the keyword phrases it used to rank on the first page have gone, completely gone...even searching for a keyword phrase+county it doesn't rank, only keyword phrase+town.

I've gone through every piece of code, there are no duplicate pages and its squeaky clean. The only thing I can think of now is that Google does not like the fact that the images are served from my central repository where I store all my images.

Why would it affect this site and no other site that uses the same central repository?

it's likely that both are used in searching for your company name.

Nope, searchers in this widget trade search for specific keyword phrases and specifically one more than any other.

[Robert Charlton]

I'm not understanding... I thought the question was about company name searches with and without apostrophes.

I certainly can't imagine that Google would penalize a site for other searches simply because there was an apostrophe in the company name.

[Robert Charlton]

But, a PS to the above... and this is grasping at straws... that site isn't coming up for your own name (ie, with apostrophes), might be an indicator the you're have problems with your main set of backlinks. Is that what your question was getting at?

[HuskyPup]

Is that what your question was getting at?

Nope:-) However:

your main set of backlinks

I have checked many of these and several do show the name without the apostrophe yet the strongest backlinks are spot on. Interestingly several of these links show exampleexample.com rather than example-example.com

This brochure site used to rank well for all the widgets sold then all of a sudden more or less disappeared from Google yet everything was still in the index but mostly in last place.

The first problem I found, and I have absolutely no idea why or how this happened, was that although the site had always been known as example-example.com, Google in its wisdom suddenly started listing pages as exampleexample.com.

I removed the 301 exampleexample.com from our server and URL forwarded it and hard coded every link as example-example.com.

No improvement whatsoever.

I've gone through everything on this site, it was constructed it with the same methodology I do with all my sites yet it was suddenly penalised.

I brought up the apostrophe question since that is the only issue I can see, apart from possibly the images repository.

even searching for a keyword phrase+county it doesn't rank

This is extremely significant. This is one of less than 10 companies in the county with spurious and totally useless directory sites all over the place and the #1 result a company that went bust 2 years ago!

It is not even listed under local business results yet local directories are there WITH the company details and links to the site.

If it's not the apostrophe then I can only believe it's a complete geo-targetting screw-up with it being a .com even though it has been UK hosted and registered all its life.

As an experiment I am going to take a cut-down version of the site and launch it under a different domain name to see what happens since I am convinced this site has been accidentally penalised.

I suppose the obvious thing to do would be to move it all to exampleexample.com and see if the problem continues or disappears however it's now become a serious question for me since my main directory site is an example-example.com!

[nomis5]

Before taking a cut down version and launching under a different name (duplicate content problems?) why not resolve the central repository issue for the images? I can't think why it might be causing the problem but maybe Google's algo has changed for the worse.

Where are the images held?

[HuskyPup]

why not resolve the central repository issue for the images?

That's very easy for me to do however the question has to be why this specific web site and no other?

Where are the images held?

The same UK server for about 4 years.

I have just made a comparison between Google search and image results. Using the same 3 keyword phrase none of the pages show anywhere in search yet in images they are there on the first page, many in first position, and under example-example.com!

Interestingly I have seen in my logs this morning more referrals by Google to more 10+ year old sites I have with the names as example-example.com and G is showing them in the results as exampleexample.com even though they are on a straight URL forward to example-example.com, not framed or anything like that.

What could be going on?

Is this a glitch in the system I now have to live with even though Yahoo! and Live do not have a problem with it?

One thing is for certain, all the sites I have without hyphens have not had any problems whatsoever, yet!

[tedster]

Have you considered that not all "apostrophes" are created equal? Sometimes the character is the straight apostrophe, and sometimes it is the angled single quote version. Might that be a factor that is monekying around with your backlink juice?

At any rate, when I choose business names from now on I'll follow the example set by craigslist and bag the extra punctuation.

[HuskyPup]

The apostrophe is a UK keyboard curved one however I'm beginning to feel that Robert Charlton may be on to something with the backlinks but solely for the index page.

With it being a relatively old and well-established site much of its traffic is coming through those links therefore I have recommended to leave the site as-is just to see what happens and also because it is a very good brochure site.

I have offered to build for free a new 30 page site under a new keyword domain with all new pages etc just to see what happens.

I'm bugged about this now and just want to find out if I can locate the "problem" or whether the site has found a G glitch.

Owing to the products sold, fortunately the client does not rely on this site for its living therefore its not had a major impact for them...makes me look a bit of a fool though when I can't find a reason or explain why it has happened!

[iridiax]

I had problems with possessive keywords in page titles not ranking in Google, and it turned out to be a fancy/smart/curly (whatever they are called) quote problem. Google was not ranking the regular, straight keyboard apostrophe keywords the same as the ones with a single fancy quote. Also, searchers do not use fancy quotes when typing in searches. I switched to regular apostrophes in my titles and text, and my traffic and rankings greatly improved.

[Cliffy]

I, too, have had problems that I believe to be due to the apostrophe. I have a fledgling widgets website. I spent about 2 months trying to optimise "ladies' widgets" and was surprised at the results. Lots of slog and I got the site to page 1 of Google and Yahoo for the search criteria "ladies widgets" and "vintage ladies widgets" (we have a specialist category of vintage).

Then I turned my attention to men's widgets and try and try and try nothing seemed to work on Google (but ranking OK'ish on Yahoo) even though I had put in at least as much effort on this category and the search criterion of "mens widgets" as I had on "ladies widgets".

I looked at the differences and became suspicious of the apostrophe. In "ladies' widgets" the apostrophe is at the end of the word "ladies" and therefore (I assume) irrelevant. In "men's widgets" it splits the word. I became more and more convinced that this had to be the problem - I could not think of another explanation.

I looked at this from the point of view of the searcher who is unlikely to bother putting an apostrophe in his/her search at all and decided to take the chance and change all occurances of "men's widgets" on my website to "mens widgets" even though it goes against the grain to publish something that is grammatically wrong. Well, "mens widgets" is also a link on my site and I'm waiting for Google to finish with my sitemap so I can't give you the results yet. Right now I'm keeping my fingers crossed because this isn't an academic exercise - it's my business I am talking about.

I will report the results as soon as I can.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 3:49 am (utc) on Oct. 7, 2008]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]

[ecmedia]

I think there may be other factors at play because I often search for the store BJ's (a members only shopping club in my area) and results are just fine. Actually as you type BJ in Google it suggests BJ's.