Plural keywords

To "s" or not to "s"

[benne2jp]

Oh boy. You should have seen the look on my face when, amidst all the bad during Update Florida, I got a #1 for a one-word keyword out of 22 million results. I optimized for widgets (notice the "s") instead of widget and traffic is about 2% of what I thought it would be. Just because of one friggin' "s". And the sad part is, it's logical to search for this term with an s on the end but people aren't! Question is- done anyone know of a tool similar to Overture's search term suggestion tool that will let you see searches with or without the "s"?

[Brett_Tabke]

Why not do both? Two different pages or sections of your site. Mix it up!

[Just Guessing]

Adwords gives you a traffic estimator that differentiates singular & plural keywords.

But the world is changing:

Search for blue widget

Yes, really - At #3 I see a webmasterworld forum post with blue widgets (plural) in bold.

Search for blue widget -ghdhd and it shows singular matches again.

Search for widget and it only shows me singular matches - seems this only happens for multiple keyword searches.

So maybe you just have to wait a month or two before Google applies word stemming to single keyword searches too.

Mind you, the exact match obviously still carries more weight.

[karembeu]

I've had similar recently, after Florida too, we are #2 for a search WITH plural (1 or 2 occurences on page), but NOWHERE anymore for the much more frequently used (and frequent on our pages) singular term? Confused.

karembeu

[LogicMan]

This seems to be another item affected by the 'florida' update.

For the last several months singular vs plural didn't make much difference. Whatever you ranked for one, you would rank very close on the other.

Now, on several searches that I rank top 5 for singular I'm not found (not top 500 at least) for the plural.

[Macro]

For the last several months singular vs plural didn't make much difference

I beg to differ. For many months prior to Florida we used to rank very well for some keywords in plural (usually #1) but were nowhere in first 500 for the singular version.

[LogicMan]

Marco, That's interesting. There had been discussion the the singular and plurals had 'merged'. At that time (about 2 months ago?), I noticed that for the 15 - 20 keyword combinations I watch, I took the previous ranking for singular (my better rank) and average it with the plural ranking and that would be my ranking for both (give or take a few positions).

Whatever, the past (before florida update) and now does not seem to apply for anything in my area.

[Aberdeen]

We have one websites which targets singular keywords and one to targets plural keywords which since Florida has totally messed things up. Now the single and plural searches are the same! But we are gonna wait to see if google goes back to the old serps. Hopefully not, as it's a little easier to manage now and I always thought it was stupid to get different results depending on if you added an s to the end of your search or not. This seems to be the opposite of most peoples experiences though.

[mrwhy2k]

After the Florida update I have noticed the same thing.

It seems that the filter has been applied for 'widgets' but I mention 'widget' just once on the page and I am number #2 in Google.
I am trying to over optimized pages for the singular words now and see if I can get the plurals in the process. It might actually work...