W3C validations.

[Alexis]

If I have a website with "w3c validation services" as a keyword appearing a lot, and someone types "w3c validation service" as their search in google, will the site still get pulled? Does google read singluar and plural words the same?

[Jan]

You will definitely see different SERPs for singulars and plurals. So, you should optimise for both.

[kev woodman]

Google does use automatic stemming for 'many words' but as you can't be sure which ones it stems and which it doesn't it's probably better to be safe than sorry.

Interestingly word order also makes a difference.

In your example, I would have thought that Google probably do stem service and services but squeezing in a couple of singular instances can't hurt.

More info at lib.flinders.edu.au/info/branch/medical/guides/google.pdf

[paul]

Check the following search result in google.co.uk;

UK matrimonial; search results; 368,000
google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=UK+matrimonial&btnG=Google+Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK%7CcountryGB

UK matrimonials; search results; 14,100
google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=UK+matrimonials&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK%7CcountryGB

You can find the differences, hence its better to optimize both keywords seperately.

[kev woodman]

Although interestingly the site at the top for matrimonial uses the keyword 'matrimonials' far more than it's counterpart on the 'matrimonial' search.

[paul]

The reason I think the search engine reconginse both as same word but not treat both same as both have different backlinks.

[Peter]

Most of the top search engines consider the plural keyword to be different from the singular keyword so I think you are better off optimizing your site for both the plural and singular versions of your keywords, assuming that both versions are popular.

[paul]

If SE would have considered both singular and plural words differently it would have been reflected irrelevant search results in terms of pages but as per above example both search results have quite relevant pages for example like Humsafar.co.uk - UK matrimonial, The Muslim Matrimonial Europe, though I have not checked all result pages here but I find most of them are quite relevant., hence the search engine reconginse both as same word but might be not treating both same way.