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
-
How do I "undo" or remove a Google Search Console change of address?
I have a client that set a change of address in Google Search Console where they informed Google that their preferred domain was a subdomain, and now they want Google to also consider their base domain (without the change of address). How do I get the change of address in Google search console removed?
Technical SEO | | KatherineWatierOng0 -
How to avoid instead suggestion from Google search results ?
Hi, When I search for "Zotey" in google, the following message is being displayed. Showing results for zotye
Technical SEO | | segistics
Search instead for zotey Anyone let me know how to get rid of this conflict asap? Regards, Sivakumar.0 -
Why has my search traffic suddenly tanked?
On 6 June, Google search traffic to my Wordpress travel blog http://www.travelnasia.com tanked completely. There are no warnings or indicators in Webmaster Tools that suggest why this happened. Traffic from search has remained at zero since 6 June and shows no sign of recovering. Two things happened on or around 6 June. (1) I dropped my premium theme which was proving to be not mobile friendly and replaced it with the ColorMag theme which is responsive. (2) I relocated off my previous hosting service which was showing long server lag times to a faster host. Both of these should have improved my search performance, not tanked it. There were some problems with the relocation to the new web host which resulted in a lot of "out of memory" errors on the website for 3-4 days. The allowed memory was simply not enough for the complexity of the site and the volume of traffic. After a few days of trying to resolve these problems, I moved the site to another web host which allows more PHP memory and the site now appears reliably accessible for both desktop and mobile. But my search traffic has not recovered. I am wondering if in all of this I've done something that Google considers to be a cardinal sin and I can't see it. The clues I'm seeing include: Moz Pro was unable to crawl my site last Friday. It seems like every URL it tried to crawl was of the form http://www.travelnasia.com/wp-login.php?action=jetpack-sso&redirect_to=http://www.travelnasia.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines which resulted in a 500 status error. I don't know why this happened but I have disabled the Jetpack login function completely, just in case it's the problem. GWT tells me that some of my resource files are not accessible by GoogleBot due to my robots.txt file denying access to /wp-content/plugins/. I have removed this restriction after reading the latest advice from Yoast but I still can't get GWT to fetch and render my posts without some resource errors. On 6 June I see in Structured Data of GWT that "items" went from 319 to 1478 and "items with errors" went from 5 to 214. There seems to be a problem with both hatom and hcard microformats but when I look at the source code they seem to be OK. What I can see in GWT is that each hcard has a node called "n [n]" which is empty and Google is generating a warning about this. I see that this is because the author vcard URL class now says "url fn n" but I don't see why it says this or how to fix it. I also don't see that this would cause my search traffic to tank completely. I wonder if anyone can see something I'm missing on the site. Why would Google completely deny search traffic to my site all of a sudden without notifying any kind of penalty? Note that I have NOT changed the content of the site in any significant way. And even if I did, it's unlikely to result in a complete denial of traffic without some kind of warning.
Technical SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson1 -
Should i Disavow links from Secret Search Engine Labs
Hi, I'm doing a link audit. My sites' keyword rankings and organic traffic have been sent to the Phantom Zone since the last Penguin Update. I've got 70+ and counting follow backlinks to my main domain and one of the my subdomains from http://www.secretsearchenginelabs.com/; should i disavow them? There's a load of links to many recognisable sites in there and my instinct's all out of whack with this decision. I think that these links were all manually added by a link building company on our behalf. It does look manipulated to me but i'd like a second opinion before I dump all of those links. Thanks Thanks
Technical SEO | | McCaldin0 -
"Search Box Optimization"
A client of ours recently received en email from a random SEO "company" claiming they could increase website traffic using a technique known as "search box optimization". Essentially, they are claiming they can insert a company name into the autocomplete results on Google. Clearly, this isn't a legitimate service - however, is it a well known technique? Despite our recommendation to not move forward with it, the client is still very intrigued. Here is a video of a similar service:
Technical SEO | | McFaddenGavender
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW2Fz6dy1_A0 -
Tool to search relative vs absolute internal links
I'm preparing for a site migration from a .co.uk to a .com and I want to ensure all internal links are updated to point to the new primary domain. What tool can I use to check internal links as some are relative and others are absolute so I need to update them all to relative.
Technical SEO | | Lindsay_D0 -
HELP: Wrong domain showing up in Google Search
So i have this domain (1)devicelock.com and i also had this other domain (2)ntutility.com, the 2nd domain was an old domain and it is not in use anymore. But when i search for devicelock on Google, the homepage devicelock.com does not exist. Only ntutility.com comes up. I asked one of the developer how the redirect is happening from the old domain to the new one and he told me its through a DNS forward. And there is no way to have an .htacess file to set up a 301 instead. Please help!
Technical SEO | | Devicelock0 -
Why are Google search results different if you are log'd into Google or not?
I get different results when I'm log'd into my Google account associated with my website than if I'm not. The same country is occurring. So how can I rely on the google results I'm seeing? For instance my site is page 1 with the improvements I made based on SEOMOZ if I'm log'd in. Yet I'm not on the first 25 pages if I'm not logged in.
Technical SEO | | Romana0