Should i change the url name for serp plural from singular to plural please advise

[reallyitsme]

Hi,

I have an established ecommerce site online since 2008 when I set it up I did not really think about it and i called it mywidget. However the traffic is minimum 10 times higher for plural and all the long tails ie bluewidgets, cheapwidgets are all plural.

I rank very well on the widget but not widgets - I know there is more competition but still it would be best to have the most commonly used phrases in the url.

Now I have registered mywidgets should i transfer my shop to mywidgets and setup a permanen redirect 301 for all the  products url and categories.

I'm guessing I will be negatively impacted in the short term but in the long term it should be worth it. Would you agree sorry its a massive decision for me and any help would be much appreciated.

Many thanks

[Highland]

I wouldn't change a URL simply to make it plural. You'll lose some SEO momentum in changing. Change your copy and links to use plural and I bet you can find you still rank well.

[reallyitsme]

thanks for taking the time to reply. All my links are plural after six months I found the error in my thinking...I just think if its a redirect so widget-a redirects widgets-a in the long term it will be better. Thanks again for your reply.

[Devin_Anderson]

Chances are, from a purely SEO point of view, it would be more beneficial to have your site on mywidgets than on mywidget.

Whether or not its worth it financially will depend on how big a boost you get out of changing the url, and this will primarily depend on the competitiveness of the new keywords you are targeting.

If you do a quick google on "website widgets" or "free widgets", you'll see that the top few sites don't actually have 'widgets' in their domain name, it's 'widget'. This is probably because they're incredibly competitive search terms and those websites are simply far more authoritative than their 'widgets' competitors. The lack of an 's' in their names verges on insignificant in comparison to their massive backlink profiles which have been necessary to put them at the top of the SERP.

Including the 's' is likely to help, but don't count on it doing the job all on its own.

The worst thing that could happen is you go through all the trouble of moving and find that it hasn't made enough of a difference to justify the loss of traffic while moving. With this in mind, if I was in your shoes I would start by experimenting with Meta Titles and on-page copy on a few of my pages to see what difference that makes, before moving the entire domain - temporarily 301'ing mywidgets into mywidget.

One last thing to consider is that a 301 does not pass all the link juice from one domain to another. It's estimated that you tend to lose about 10% of the 'juice' in the redirect. Redirecting from mywidget to mywidgets will result in a more relevant, but less authoritative website.

Hope that helps

Devin

[reallyitsme]

Hi Devin,

many thanks for your reply. It does very much sense of what you are saying and you are right most competitors don't even have widgets in title. Good example Google is google not best search results.com

I think I might go for it because it will bug me for years if I dont change it because all the long tails is all plural...ie cheap blue widgets rather then blue widget....

Is there an alternative to 301 what I planned to do is redirect each product to the new product so done correctly or is there a better way..

Many thanks again