is a plural counted as a single?

keywords....keyword?

[soapystar]

does google treat plurals the same as singles in the title..and if so would

keyword, keywords ....

be counted as repetition?

[Beachboy]

With Google, plural and singular are treated separately. "Car" and "Cars" are two separate things.

[john5]

I have VERY different ranking positions for the same word in plural and in singular. For one keyword for example I have the number one in plural and in singular I am not even among the first 100.

[Nick_W]

Good question soapy! When I check keywords in the Overture keyword finder It always changes my singular/plurals but I did notice google didn't.

Nick

[soapystar]

thats what threw me...u cant find the difference between singular and plural with overture...making it harder to know which to target!..and even if google treat them as two words..am i open to being penalised by other serach engines?

[Beachboy]

Yes, Overture's keyword popularity tool has some serious problems. When you are querying about a keyword, also observe plural and singular varients of it, as well as some alternate spellings, other forms of the keyword. They do group some results, and I rather wish they wouldn't.

[MHes]

hi

As an aside....
Google say they ignore 'in' and 'the' etc......
However, a search like "jobs in scotland" produces different results to "job scotland"

What's all that about?

[chiyo]

Well i guess the overture tool was not meant for SEO's in general but for the express purpose of suggesting keywords to advertisers! Since keywords like dog and dogs are the same in Overture, therefore it makes absolute sense to combine them there as well

Google does not accept some variants or plurals as different kewywords since a couple of years back. In fact they combined several of our old listings which differered onlu by plurals.

[ciml]

Michael, stopwords like "in" and "the" are not used to filter the results (at least not when they're treated as stopwords) but the proximity of the terms in the search is counted.

hotel in mars, mars hotel and hotel mars 
0........9..., 0....5.... and 0.....5...

The proximity from hotel to mars might be indicated as +9, -5, and +5. If the text matches the query then it's a much better match. For phrases where the top listings are quite close in other respects, this proximity can affect rankings considerably.

[gmoney]

I just did a check on Google and found that the rankings (100 listings) are the same for: hotel a mars, hotel in mars, hotel how mars, hotel with mars. It appears that Google ignores various stopwords but they do consider whether a stop word was used since the above results are very different from just: hotel mars.

[MHes]

ciml
Wow... that is really interesting. I am going to have to think this one through. So although google say they ignore these words, it is only their meaning they ignore, not their existence. Therefore I need to determine whether or not people search for 'jobs in Scotland' or 'jobs scotland' because of the proximity issue. If I optimise for one.... I miss the other. If I optimise for both, I run the risk of overdoing it or having contrived body text!
Oh well, that's my Sunday out the window!

[shelleycat]

There was a related article in the feedback section of the New Scientist recently where they noted that, although both the and who are ignored in results returned (ie are treated as stopwords), a search for the who (no quotes) still returns a large number of results. I asked my computergeek boyfriend how they do this and he only got as far as "well they must index those words, it's just a difference in how they return the results".

Maybe if somene can answer how a query of entirely stopwords returns a result then it would also throw light on the use of stop words in searchs in general?

[umbria]

gnmoney

Perhaps your example didn't work because hotel mars isn't a common phrase. Try "hotel london" and "hotel in london" and you get very different results on google.
As an earlier poster pointed out, this is likely the proximity of the words on the pages that's affecting the results.

[gmoney]

umbria,
Yes, I agree that hotel london gives very different results from hotel in london. However, I was just pointing out that hotel in london gives the same results of say: hotel a london, hotel how london, hotel with london.

[vitaplease]

Overture groups single/plural but also US-English/British English and generally displays the US single word version.

Something to also take into account when checking the Search Term Suggestion Tool "Searches done in Month 2002" and using these data for other Search engines.

In this thread I suggested Google could offer the option of displaying only US, only British or Both spelling versions.

[webmasterworld.com...] msg582

Google could actually do the same for single and plural search queries.
A search for "preventing tumors" gives different results from "preventing tumor". I am sure the average searcher would forget searching for both and would be helped with the extra results?

[ciml]

As gmoney points out, stopwords are interchangeable. My example was based on character position, word position may be a much better model.

shelleycat, a word can be a stop word or not depending on the search phrase. Notice how a search for {the web} is the same as a search for {web} because 'the' is a stop word, yet a search for {the} works without 'the' being a stop word.

Good point vitaplease, but I'd like at least to have the option to search for a word as I spell it.

[vitaplease]

This could be a secret sneak-peek [uk.altavista.com]at what Google will do in the future regarding the single/plural & US-English/British English. ;)

[semiaziz]

gah! just read this. Now I have to target twice as many kw phrases. That's messed up. This whole time I'd been targeting "Britney Spear"

[soapystar]

"I'd been targeting "Britney Spear" "

yes that caught out a lot people!:-)

[Powdork]

I believe wordtracker will distinguish between singular and plural with its keyword suggestions.