Plurals in Domain Names

[Crabby]

I was considering buying a domain from someone, when a thought struck my mind. If I want to hit the SERPs for a plural, would only having the singular in the domain, affect ranking?

For example, if I bought fungun.com, as opposed to funguns.com, yet I wanted to rank for 'fun guns' in the SERPs. I'm not asking for 'which is best', I'm asking because I can only get hold of the singular for a reasonable price, and so would like to know how badly my rankings would be affected.

Any ideas?

[[rateAcoder]]

Yes...AFAIK, it affects as SE's see them differently.
For ex:
Keyword "gun" in Goog yields ~ 26,700,000 results, while
"guns" returns ~ 17,400,000 results

Bottomline, it depends on the market your are in and the specific word.

Warm Regards,
Kavs

[Crabby]

Argh. This has really made me pretty shaky as I don't think I can cancel the transaction, and this really was an important requirement :(

[[rateAcoder]]

Sorry, if I've disappointed you.
May be others might have better ideas as to how it can be improved.

Warm Regards,
Kavs

[Anthony]

Why not register another domain with the word 'guns' in it and forward it to your singular word domain name :)

[Crabby]

That's.. not exactly the effect I want :p

Naa Kavs, I wouldn't have asked the question if I wasn't ready to be disappointed :)

[jon]

The actual domain name only holds a little weight on SERPS. If you optimise your site for guns, you will be fine.

[Premium]

The actual domain name only holds a little weight on SERPS. If you optimise your site for guns, you will be fine.

Jon is right it is all about optimization... ;)

[Crabby]

Yeah, but I've always found that the right domain helps a heck of a lot.

[edwin]

If I want to hit the SERPs for a plural, would only having the singular in the domain, affect ranking?
Yes, it would. I have a singular version domain name and a website which is not optimized for either the singular or plural of the word. It is a popular term however. And when I do a search for my singular term, my site shows up in the top 10 in both Yahoo & Google. But it's nowhere to be found when I do a search for the plural. Also interesting is in both cases the top ten results are different.

But as Jon pointed out, you can optimize your page for the plural version and still rank well even if the domain is singular. You already know this.

The only reason I can think why you might be hesitating to acquire the name is because the singular of the term is gramatically wrong or not commonly used (?) I'm just guessing. I can't think of a good example just now but something like hair.com as compared to hairs.com, where the singular is perfect but the plural isn't.

Otherwise, if both are common like hairstyle.com and hairstyles.com, I'd grab whatever I can. (especially since I'm beginning to lose mine) :D

The other thing you should also consider since you are unable to get the plural domain is: see what is currently at that site. If it is a mega website with PR7, it will probably be too hard for your site to compete with.