Google is now starting to use stemming (such as, ing, etc.) and they are displaying both singular and plural forms of the word or phrase people search for. But it looks like they are only testing this and it doesn't happen for every search.

Does this mean you no longer have to worry about whether you should optimize for the singular or plural version?

Google is still not doing this 100% yet and they do tend to place the sites that use the exact term that is being searched for ahead of websites that use another version of the word. Watch carefully, but don't make any changes yet unless you see your ranking start to go down.

Here's something else to consider with this new Google change. If there are several versions of the word that you optimized for on your page and Google counts all of the versions, you could find that your keyword density is now 30% instead of 10% and that could be a problem.

On the other hand, if your keyword density is low, this could be a big help to your page.

Bottom line: Keep a close eye on how your rankings are doing with both the singular and plural versions of your keyword phrases and also watch your overall traffic. Look for changes. I will keep you posted on exactly what to do when Google gets finished with their testing.

Don't do anything right now unless you start to see your ranking go down.

Jerry Minchey

Copyright 2003 - 2004

Note: This article may be reproduced if it is reproduced in it's entirety and the statement below is prominently included at the end of the article.

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Jerry Minchey is a long time student and practitioner of search engine optimization and is the editor of the website, www.SearchEngineU.com which is dedicated to showing search engine beginners how to achieve high rankings on Google and other search engines using website optimization techniques. ========================================================