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".
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
-
On-page SEO
This is a question for the organic SEO experts, once you added the main keyword that you want to rank for in the homepage title, meta title plus meta description, perhaps once or twice in the text on the homepage. How often do you then write it in the content marketing, say blog posts, we want to rank higher on Google for "SEO agencies Cardiff" however if you mention this in the blog posts too much say once a week, this could lead to over optimisation issues?
On-Page Optimization | | sarahwalsh1 -
Does DA/PA have any effect on rankings?
I have seen many people are concerned about increasing DA and PA of their websites. While I am very curious why do people focus on increasing DA and PA? Does DA and PA effect the rankings of the website? Because I have recently launched my website regarding men beard trimmer and it is ranking on 1st page but not on number 1 position. Will increasing DA/PA of the site help me in occupying 1st position?
On-Page Optimization | | RyanAmin0 -
Duplicating words in the page title OK?
Im finding a site with lots of duplicated words in the title tags, I have always avoided doing this in the past, Is there any penalty for having a word repeated twice in the title, indeed is there a benefit from having it twice, IM assuming not
On-Page Optimization | | Donsimong
For example: Marketing Services in Milton Keynes | Our Services | TFA
https://www.t-f-a.co.uk/services the word service is repeated twice, in my opinion this is of no benefit at all and is better rewritten to remove the duplication1 -
Do You Add City Name & Key Word For Every Page?
Hello, I'm new to SEO but feel I have a decent grasp on it. However, I had a question pertaining to key words and using my city name in it. For instance, if I am using the key word "herniated disc treatment" do I need to put in my city name behind it or does google recognize that I am already in my city area because of my geo tagging and having it listed on the footer of my site? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! -Scott
On-Page Optimization | | slgray0 -
How long should my website content be (max and min number of words)?
I saw a web site which has been number 1 on Google for a long time, and the home page has 5700 words, but the results show it is not spam, so what would be the recommended word number for a home page?
On-Page Optimization | | Majapopa0 -
ECommerce Filtering Affect on SEO
I'm building an eCommerce website which has an advanced filter on the left hand side of the category pages. It allows users to tick boxes for colours, sizes, materials, and so on. When they've made their choices they submit (this will likely be an AJAX thing in a future release, but isn't at time of writing). The new filtered page has a new URL, which is made up of the IDs of the filter's they've ticked - it's a bit like /department/2/17-7-4/10/ My concern is that the filtered pages are, on the most part, going to be the same as the parent. Which may lead to duplicate content. My other concern is that these two URLs would lead to the exact same page (although the system would never generate the 'wrong' URL) /department/2/17-7-4/10/ /department/2/**10/**17-7-4/ But I can't think of a way of canonicalising that automatically. Tricky. So the meat of the question is this: should I worry about this causing issues with the SEO - or can I have trust in Google to work it out?
On-Page Optimization | | AndieF0 -
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 -
Does having a "+" in a URL hurt SEO? Would much value be gained changing it to a hyphen?
There's a site that contains "+" signs in the URL in order to call different information for the content on the page. Would it be better to change those to hyphens (-), or not that much value will be gained, so leave them as is? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | MitchellStoker0
