PR & sigular/plural

[Skylo]

Does google have a system whereby Ones site cannot be the top of a search result in both the singular and the plural. Example: search "African Holiday" and search "African Holidays". If so what is the point?
Thanks

[korkus2000]

Hi Skylo welcome to WebmasterWorld,

I don't think they stop a site from the 2 queries, but Google does treat them as 2 different phrases. You will need to target both to come up in the serps.

[Skylo]

Thanks Korkus2000. You seem experienced enough to answer this for me. Yesterday I was in a forum and was told that constant use of hyphens was bad and that google confused this with spam. Is this true? I would post a new question but I just want one view so I can prove this to my boss.
Thanks

[korkus2000]

There is talk of Google and other engines filtering hyphenated urls, but nothing that I know of yet. I will say that in a hand check multiple hyphens don't look good, but many people use them and get good results with them. Are you only talking about the domain name or the file and path names also?

[buckworks]

In my experience search engines do not seem to penalize for hyphens either in the domain name or in directory or file names. If they like other things about the page and the off-page factors are good it will rise in the ranks regardless of the presence or absence of hyphens in the URL.

Some people (I'm one of them) suspect that wise use of hyphens is in fact a slightly positive thing because they make it easier for SEs to parse keywords in the URL.

However, too many hyphens can look silly to your human visitors, and might have negative effects such as making other webmasters more reluctant to link to you. As well, hyphens in a domain name don't work as well for off-line advertising. If possible, try to get both the hyphenated and unhyphenated version of the domain you're considering, and maybe singular/plural variants while you're at it.