Penalty on a pluralisation?

[James_WV]

Hi Everyone,

Just looking for a bit of advice on the following:

We're ranking top 5 on G.com and G.co.uk (from the web and UK) for the phrase "location A widget" and other variants (i.e. widget in location A"). However, we're not in the top 10 pages for "location A widgets" or any other pluralised variants.

Our pages never mention the singular version, only the plural. All interlinking within the site is the plural version.

I think we may have a mega menu issue at the moment as we have over 150 locations on our home page linking to the different locations, all as plurals, i.e. "location B widgets", "location C widgets". Some of these pages rank well for these phrases, some don't; some are grey barred, some have PR. I'm getting this sorted out, but I'm not sure if this is the problem or not.

I'm wondering if on this particular pluralised KW we've encountered some sort of filter or penalty?

[aristotle]

Maybe your pages are over-optimized for the plural form of the word.

I may have a similar case on one of my sites where I tried to optimize a page for "fossil widgets", but it ranks much better for "ancient widgets", even though the latter term only appears once on the page.