Include singular and plural keywords in navbar links?

Bad idea, or merely tacky?

[Winooski]

I have a client that needs Google SEO for a set of keywords, both plurals and singulars. It's a fairly substantial site (lots of pages), so I'd love to use some of the built-in PR by including navbar links to both the singular and plural forms of the words. You know, like this:

Widget
Gadget
Gizmo
---------
Widgets
Gadgets
Gizmos

Has anyone been able to use this successfully? Is this a sure-fire way to get rankings penalties? Is there, uh, perhaps a more graceful way of doing this?

[jomaxx]

You definitely want to get plurals in there if people might plausibly use them when searching, but the way to do that depends on the specific context. I don't know of any general rules that apply except: don't try to hide anything you do to optimize your site from your visitors.

[Winooski]

So in keeping with the "don't hide it" ethic, do you think it would be OK to display the similar keyword links side-by-side on the sidebar (Isn't that a musical? Side By Side By Sidebar?), or is that asking for trouble?

[sparrow]

If the only difference is the (s) in the words, then why not name the links with the pural version. Searches for the single tense will still find the word and now you have the advantage of also being found for the plural.

Did I miss something, here, I am thinking correctly or has this Overture madness gone to my head!

[buckworks]

Putting both singular and plural variants into one link might look redundant to your human visitors. Consider making slightly different navbar menus to use in different sections of your site. One bunch of pages could get the navbar with the plural keywords, a different bunch of pages could get the navbar with the singular keywords. The SE spiders would see both singular and plural variants pointing to the same page(s), and what your visitors would see on any one page would make good sense.

[Added] Some search engines will "see" the singular "widget" within the word "widgets" and some will not. Don't count on Google to see it.

[Winooski]

Thanks guys! My understanding is that Google does not do word stemming, i.e., a search for

widget

will ignore a page with only the word

widgets

, so sparrow I think your idea won't work the way I want it to.

buckworks, I like your idea. However, my client's site is somewhat wacky in that it would be much harder for me to create separate navbars for subsections of the site than it would be to do one set of global edits that's the same on every single navbar in the site. However, for other sites I work on, your tactic would definitely fly.

[sparrow]

My humble apologies, this Overture mess has me fuming....
You are correct it wouldn't work in Google, but others it could.

[BigDave]

The first thing you should do is figure out which method is searched on the most for the specific word. Now if you consider the things you can do to optimize your pages, you can try splitting them up. use "widgets" as the anchor text and "widget" as the title.

Do you still need more? Put some links in the content of your pages and in your site map with the singular "widget in the anchor text and use the plural "widgets" in the <h1> tag.

Then keep getting inbound links and make sure the content of the page uses both singualr and plural. Then get more links, then add more content with the text links.

[ciml]

It's important to use the words that people might use when looking for your pages. This helps search engines like Google to help people find what they want.

You don't want it to look odd, so there's often some compromise needed.

- Blue Widget Shop
- Blue Widgets Gallery
- Red Widget Products
- Red Widgets Gallery

Whichever has more/less competition (depending on your confidence), more people searching for it, better profit per sale or better conversion rates gets to be the home page. So in this case blue widgets might be more profitable than red widgets, and more people search for 'widget' phrases than 'widgets' phrases.

[Winooski]

BigDave, thanks for the tips. I'm not worried yet about integrating the keywords into the body of the page, because I have specific target pages that I'll be doing that for, but I appreciate the reminder.

ciml, thanks for emphasizing the need to balance the keywords' competition, popularity and additional metrics. I think this is one of those cases where the keywords have been more-or-less handed to me, so I think I'm stuck with 'em for the time being!