One of the things that I admire about the Google algo is it’s ability to “learn” and “adapt” based on incoming data. For example when search volume for a certain keywords reaches a certain volume words that were originally mis-spellings become real words. Today I came across an example of this logic being applied to site links.
For example look at the SERP for the word [tia's] you’ll notice no site links
Now search for [tias] without the apostrophe and site links appear
Your first thought might be it’s just the apostrophe, but that’s not the case [victorias secret] and [victoria's secret] both have site links
Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that people are lazy, and searches without the apostrophe are usually going to have more volume than searches with the apostrophe
While there isn’t enough search volume to get on the graph in the US and Canada you can see a teeny tiny red bar if you squint. Now when we compare [tias] with and without the apostrophe we get a similar graph, but the news graph on the bottom has both data sets.
However when we compare [victorias secret] with [tias] the volume delta is easy to spot, especially if you narrow it down to just the US (most of tias volume was non US)
So my working theory is, unless your name/brand is going to generate significant volume, keep apostrophes and other punctuation (like hyphens) out of your company name and domain name. Especially if you want to ever get site links.
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{ 9 comments }
Couldn’t the reason be that if you search for “Tia’s” it’s not clear that tias.com is what you’re searching for, but it might as well be “Tia’s Restaurant/TexMex/…”? Whereas “Victorias Secrets” (with or without apostrophe) clearly indicates that you might be looking for their website, therefore the site links.
Good post Michael … I think you’ve just answered a question that has stumped me for a while. Search volumes … makes perfect sense. Thanx!
Wolf-Howl, will you be at PubCon this year?
i think martin makes a good point. if i goo “arbys” and “arby’s” they both show me the same site links.
maybe since tias could be a number of businesses and an acronym the goo doesn’t know what you want, whereas victorias secret is pretty cut and dry either way.
I personally think it’s because one of them is about antiques (boring) and the other is about lingerie.
Bow-chika-WOW-Wow…
I’ve noticed the same thing – as well as issues with plurals.
For example: searching for Custom Home and Custom Homes in Google brings up different results, grouping and adsense.
Although I reckon that if you asked the searchers what they were looking for – they would probably tell you they were looking for the same thing.
Could it have anything to do with the title tags for these sites? Victoria’s Secret and Arby’s both use the apostrophe in their title tag, but Tias.com doesn’t. Sticking with the fast food theme, this proves true of McDonald’s. If we jump over to bulk sales, Sam’s Club has the same results. Ditto, Toys “R” Us, Denny’s, and Macy’s. All of them use the apostrophe (or quotes) in the title and get the site links both ways. Wendy’s and Dillard’s prove me wrong, but for Wendy’s Google offers a spelling correction and Dillard’s uses the apostrophe on the page (as you can see in the description).
Then there’s normsrestaurants.com which has virtually no text on the page and no apostrophe anywhere, but only get’s site links for “norm’s” and not “norms”. GTrends shows “norms” to get the bulk of search volume, but looking into Norm’s (Norms’s?) backlinks, it shows they get plenty of anchor text in the posessive. It’s my understanding that sitelinks appear when Google thinks your doing a brand search and I’ll bet they determine that just like they do rankings. I think if you want apostrophes, you just have to optimize for both spellings to get site links for both terms, just as you would to rank. You have to completely own the word. Regardless of volume.
But here’s a mind bender, iVillage get’s site links for “women’s” and “womens” though it’s no where to be found on their page. The glory of optimized anchor text I suppose.
Great post. Generally people are lazy and will forget the proper spelling in the cases of using an ’s. But I also know some that will purposely misspell the keyword for a search term because the amount of traffic they get from that keyword.
hmm to have an ’s or not. lol Love the post
http://www.PassportMentors.com
I’m surprised that Google allows a laziness of written English to rank more highly than the proper grammatical spelling.
I would have thought that the proper term would be surrounded by the variants — such as typos…
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