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.
How Much Does Punctuation of a Word Effect SEO?
-
I have a page on a site that is targeted for "mens hair cut" and I have received a F for the grade.
The content on the page uses "men's" throughout the content. (proper punctuation) When I re-graded the page with "men's hair cut" the page received a B grade.
My question is, does mens v.s men's make a different for on-page SEO? Should my targeted keywords include "men's" rather than "mens"?
-
Poor grammar can be a spam signal to search engines. A typo here and there will not hurt you -- but major mistakes with spelling and grammar in every word and every sentence will likely hurt you. There's a middle ground somewhere, but only the search engines know what that is.
Of course, I would copyedit and proofread so that all text is perfect. Not for search engines -- but so that users do not see poor spelling and grammar and then judge your website to be less quality and authoritative. In the end, it's all about usability for humans. Search engines generally aim to show what websites users think are the best.
-
Hi,
"My question is, does mens v.s men's make a different for on-page SEO?"
Google are always going to look for the grammatically correct wording, so it is important to always ensure this is what you give them. As Andrew said, MOZ & Google are going to have pretty major differences in what they look for and how they grade it.
You also have to think about visitors that land on your page and find the lack of punctuation, and yes, people will do this. I'm not saying that it would lose you business, but I would never give anyone the chance to question any aspect of credibility.
Would wording this incorrectly leave you with a penalty? Nope! Would getting this right form part of a score on one of the Google algorithms? More than likely - but to what degree is anyone's guess.
-Andy
-
Hey Primocards,
There are a couple of factors here:
- The "on-page grade" you got was from Moz's crawler, and they're very specific about exact matches. On the other hand, Google's crawler tends to be more loose. Moz doesn't futz around w/ variations with punctuation, plurals, etc. And yet Google will know that "men's" and "mens" are fairly similar.
- I have noticed that Google does have different rankings for slightly different permutations, e.g. "printing company" vs "printing companies" can lead to a local (with local packs) versus a national search (no local packs)
- Then there's the grammar. I'd say that "men's" is the more accurate, and that may have a small (IMO, the effect is probably very small) impact
tl;dr; change it if you can, otherwise, don't worry about it. If you just want to improve the usability your Moz reports, just change the keyword you're grading from "men's" to "mens".
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
-
Too much internal linking?
Hi everyone, Too much of anything is not good. In terms of internal linking, how many are too many? I read that the recommended internal links are about 100 links per page otherwise it dilutes the page's link equity. I have a concern about one of our websites - according to search console, the homepage has 923 internal links. All the pages have a corresponding /feed page added to the page URL, which is really weird (is this caused by a plugin?). The site also has an e-com feature, but it is not used as the site is essentially a brochure and customers are encouraged to visit the shop. I assume the e-com feature also increases this number. On the other hand, one of the competitors we are tracking has 1 internal link site-wide. Ours is at 45,000 site-wide. How is it possible to only have 1 internal link? Is this a Moz bug? I know we also need to reduce our internal links badly, however, I'm not sure where to start. I don't know how these internal links are linked together - some aren't in the copy or navigation menu. When I scan the homepage links using 'check my links', the total links identified for the homepage is only 170. kAeYlTM
On-Page Optimization | | nhhernandez0 -
Word Count - Content site vs ecommerce site
Hi there, what are your thoughts on word count for a content site vs. an ecommerce site. A lot of content sites have no problem pushing out 500+ words per page, which for me is a decent amount to help you get traction. However on ecommerce sites, a lot of the time the product description only needs to be sub-100 words and the total word count on the page comes in at under 300 words, a lot of that could be considered duplicate. So what are your views? Do ecommerce sites still need to have a high word count on the product description page to rank better?
On-Page Optimization | | Bee1590 -
HTML Site SEO (NO CMS)
I have got a client site, which is dated (2007) and has not been shifted to any recognised CMS yet. It is HTML based. Is it possible to SEO on such a site? Is it even worth it? If it is possible to do SEO on this, any suggestions will be highly appreciated. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | ArthurRadtke3 -
SEO value of old press releases (as content)?
Howdy Moz Community, I'm working with a client on migrating content to a new site/CMS and am wondering whether anyone has thoughts on the value of old press releases. I'm familiar with the devaluation of press release links from early 2013, but I'm wondering more about their value as content. Does importing old press releases (3-5 years old) create contextual depth of content that has some value for the site as a whole (even though the news contained within is useless)? Or, do these old press releases just create clutter and waste time (in migration). The site has a wealth of additional content (articles and videos), so the press releases wouldn't be covering up for thin content. I'm just wondering whether there's any best practices or a general rule of thumb. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | MilesMedia0 -
Using Escaped Fragments with SEO
Our e-commerce platform is in the process of changing to what we call app based stores (essentially running in a browser as single page web-app) With these new stores they are being built in HTML 5 and using escaped fragments.
On-Page Optimization | | marketing_zoovy.com
Currently merchants are usually running 2 stores until we launch to app site at 100%. My questions are really concerning the app stores which right now show on a subdomain but will essentially take over the primary domain. Here is an example:
app.tikimater.com and app.sportsworld.com Since I am not a developer, I'm really having a hard time understanding the escaped fragments. I'm using this but https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started I'm not sure what my actual urls should look like and what the canonical should be set to. Right now they have been removed but previously they had http:app.tikimaster.com#!v=1 Also, and how I should be setting up my meta information for Google so 1) pages are indexed timely 2) pages are indexed with the correct information. I am still setting the meta titles and descriptions but in some instances Google uses other info. With the new platform we are moving away from on page content (written paragraphs) but category pages would have related products embedded. Should I still be pushing to have some type of intro text, since it would solely be for SEO and not the shoppers experience. All product pages have content (product description etc) Thank you for any advice0 -
SEO Optimizing in UMBRACO
Hi there, I am planning to use UMBRACO to manage my existing website, so my question to Seomozzers out there is what should I be aware of, how safe is it to have UMBRACO in terms of SEO. By using this software, would it be possible to get a positive or negative impact on my keyword rankings? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | matti_wilson0 -
How much juice do you lose in a 301 redirect?
Our site has a number of, shall we say, unoptimized URLs. I would like to change the URLs to be more relevant; if a page is about red widgets, the URL should be www.domain.com/red-widgets.html, right? I'm getting resistance on this, however, based on the belief that you lose something significant when you 301 an old URL to a new one. Now, I know that if you have a long chain of redirects, the spiders will stop following at some point, and that is a huge problem. That wouldn't apply if there's only one step in the chain, however. I've also heard that you lose some link juice in a 301, but I'm unsure how serious that problem actually is. Is it small enough that we'd win out in the long run with better-optimized URLs?
On-Page Optimization | | CMC-SD0 -
Are blank Product Review pages bad for SEO?
Hi there, I'm running a new e-commerce site (BoatOutfitters.com) and have a question about our product review pages. On our current campaign, we have a lot of duplicate page content errors. When we export the data, it's almost all blank product review pages (since we are new, we don't have that many product reviews yet). Our product reviews aren't run through javascript, so we originally did not add them to a robots.txt file - however, I'm now wondering if it's worse to have all of these duplicate blank pages, or is it not affecting our SEO at all? Should we just wait until these products have reviews which will benefit our SEO and then they won't be considered "duplicate pages" - right? Sorry if this has been answered before - new here at SEO Moz and just looking for some help. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | BoatOutfitters0