Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does an Apostrophe affect searches?
-
Does Google differentiate between keyphrase structures such as Mens Sunglasses & Men**'**s Sunglasses? I.e. does the inclusion/exclusion of an apostrophe make any difference when optimising your main keyword/phrase for a page?
Keyword explorer appears to give different results..... I.e. no data for Men's Sunglasses, but data appears for Mens sunglasses. So if I optimise my page to include the apostrophe, will it screw the potential success for that page?
Thanks
Bob
-
Hi there!
Search engines have gotten smarter in the past few years and should be able to determine that the keyword (with AND without an apostrophe) means the same thing. I wouldn't worry about the keywords you're tracking and the keywords you're using within your content if the only difference is the apostrophe usage.
-
Thank you Rob, that really helps!
-
Hi Bob,
Search engines are pretty good about grammar and punctuation. As a general rule, rankings aren't impacted by your use (or lack thereof) of punctuation in your titles, content, etc.
The only time punctuation in your content might make a difference is if the punctuation alters the meaning of the sentence - an example I like to use involves a title of an article on Rachel Ray which reads, "Rachel Ray finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog" which, with proper grammar, would read, "Rachel Ray finds inspiration in cooking, her family and her dog". Obviously, these 2 sentences mean completely different things, and Google will pick up on that based on your content.
The reason keyword explorer is kicking back no data for the search term including the apostrophe is likely because no one uses the apostrophe when conducting their search. As an example, if I am looking for a plumber in New York City, I'm going to search "plumber new york city" or "plumber nyc" rather than "I am looking for a plumber in New York City, New York".
To answer your question directly:
No, using apostrophes in your content will in no way impede your ability to rank for your keyword in the example you have given. You have given contextual information which Google will interpret and rank your pages accordingly.
Hope this helps to explain what's going on. Let me know if you have any follow-up questions.
Cheers,
Rob
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Page disappears from Google search results
Hi, I recently encountered a very strange problem.
Technical SEO | | JoelssonMedia
One of the pages I published in my website ranked very well for a couple of days on top 5, then after a couple of days, the page completely vanished, no matter how direct I search for it, does not appear on the results, I check GSC, everything seems to be normal, but when checking Google analytics, I find it strange that there is no data on the page since it disappeared and it also does not show up on the 'active pages' section no matter how many different computers i keep it open. I have checked to page 9, and used a couple of keyword tools and it appears nowhere! It didn't have any back links, but it was unique and high quality. I have checked on the page does still exist and it is still readable. Has this ´happened to anyone before? Any thoughts would be gratefully received.0 -
Hide sitelinks from Google search results
Does anyone have any recommendations on how you can tell Google (hopefully via a URL) not to index that page of a website? I have tried through SEO Yoast to hide certain sitemaps (which has worked to a degree) but certain functionalities of Wordpress websites show links without them actually being part of a "sitemap" so those links are harder to hide. I'm having an issue with one of my websites - the sitelinks that Google is suggesting are nowhere near the most popular pages and I know that you can't make recommendations through Google not to show certain pages through Search Console. anymore. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MainstreamMktg0 -
Robots.txt & meta noindex--site still shows up on Google Search
I have set up my robots.txt like this: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock
Disallow: / and I have this meta tag in my on a Wordpress site, set up with SEO Yoast name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/> I did "Fetch as Google" on my Google Search Console My website is still showing up in the search results and it says this: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt" This site has not shown up for years and now it is ranking above my site that I want to rank for this keyword. How do I get Google to ignore this site? This seems really weird and I'm confused how a site with little content, that has not been updated for years can rank higher than a site that is constantly updated and improved.1 -
New theme adds ?v=1d20b5ff1ee9 to all URL's as part of cache. How does this affect SEO
New theme I am working in ads ?v=1d20b5ff1ee9 to every URL. Theme developer says its a server setting issue. GoDaddy support says its part of cache an becoming prevalent in new themes. How does this impact SEO?
Technical SEO | | DML-Tampa0 -
Inurl: search shows results without keyword in URL
Hi there, While doing some research on the indexation status of a client I ran into something unexpected. I have my hypothesis on what might be happing, but would like a second opinion on this. The query 'site:example.org inurl:index.php' returns about 18.000 results. However, when I hover my mouse of these results, no index.php shows up in the URL. So, Google seems to think these (then duplicate content) URLs still exist, but a 301 has changed the actual goal URL? A similar things happens for inurl:page. In fact, all the 'index.php' and 'page' parameters were removed over a year back, so there in fact shouldn't be any of those left in the index by now. The dates next to the search results are 2005, 2008, etc. (i.e. far before 2013). These dates accurately reflect the times these forums topic were created. Long story short: are these ~30.000 'phantom URLs' in the index out of total of ~100.000 indexed pages hurting the search rankings in some way? What do you suggest to get them out? Submitting a 100% coverage sitemap (just a few days back) doesn't seem to have any effect on these phantom results (yet).
Technical SEO | | Theo-NL0 -
How does a search engine bot navigate past a .PDF link?
We have a large number of product pages that contain links to a .pdf of the technical specs for that product. These are all set up to open in a new window when the end user clicks. If these pages are being crawled, and a bot follows the link for the .pdf, is there any way for that bot to continue to crawl the site, or does it get stuck on that dangling page because it doesn't contain any links back to the site (it's a .pdf) and the "back" button doesn't work because the page opened in a new window? If this situation effectively stops the bot in its tracks and it can't crawl any further, what's the best way to fix this? 1. Add a rel="nofollow" attribute 2. Don't open the link in a new window so the back button remains finctional 3. Both 1 and 2 or 4. Create specs on the page instead of relying on a .pdf Here's an example page: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/mackie-cfx12-mkii-compact-mixer  - The technical spec .pdf is located under the "Downloads" tab [the content is all on one page in the source code - the tabs are just a design element] Thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Dana
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
How to handle (internal) search result pages?
Hi Mozers, I'm not quite sure what the best way is to handle internal search pages. In this case it's for an ecommerce website with about 8.000+ products and search pages currently look like: example.com/search.php?search=QUERY+HERE. I'm leaning towards making them follow, noindex. Since pages like this can be easily abused for duplicate content and because I'd rather have the category pages ranked. How would you handle this?
Technical SEO | | Qon0 -
Should I set up a disallow in the robots.txt for catalog search results?
When the crawl diagnostics came back for my site its showing around 3,000 pages of duplicate content. Almost all of them are of the catalog search results page. I also did a site search on Google and they have most of the results pages in their index too. I think I should just disallow the bots in the /catalogsearch/ sub folder, but I'm not sure if this will have any negative effect?
Technical SEO | | JordanJudson0