For Sale Plural or Non-Plural .ca.

[Irish31]

This probably does not soley pertain to the .CA TLD, but since thats what we are all focused on, i'm interested in Canadians thoughts on this.

The question? When is a plural better then a single word .CA, or vice versa.


For instance, a single word like:

Bank.ca
or
Banks.ca

Then, look at a double word name, such as:

homelisting.ca
or
homelistings.ca

or something like

mortgageloan.ca
vs
mortgageloans.ca


Obviously, having both is ideal, but if you could have only one, or you saw that one of the above was taken, lets say the plural, is it worth taking the singular, if it was clear the owner of the plural didn't even care enough to register it (which I have seen many times) ?


I'm curious on your guys thoughts on this. I have seen some decent .CA's in the past taken in the plural, but left in the singular, now-a-days thats only true for double word domains as anything good in a one worder is pretty much gone.

Would you rather have homelistings.ca over homelisting.ca, and if so, how much more, would you even take the non-plural if it was around, assuming the keywords were good to start off with?


Thanks for any input you guys chime in with!

 

[hugegrowth]

There is no one rule for singular/plural. I do keyword tool searches to see if people search more for the singular or plural. I also check on Google and Yahoo to see if the plural or singular has more returns.

At first glance I'd take homelistings over homelisting. The plural might be better for someone looking for listings, the singular maybe better for someone looking to list their home.

keyword tool says:

'home listing': 3659
'home listings': 4904

After doing these checks you usually see if they are about equal, or one used much more than the other. Sometimes it can make a big difference whether there's an 's' on the end or not. You can also look at all the other returns, see how many other terms that includes the same words are searched for (ie: the long tail)

home listings 4904
free foreclosure listings real estate foreclosure home 1605
foreclosed home listings 1014
hud home listings 359
mls home listings 275
free home listings 270
free hud home listings 244
mobile home listings 177
new home listings 177
free home foreclosure listings 156
new home listings in mississauga 101
home foreclosure listings 100


In french the plural 's' is usually silent, which leads to a lot of typos and makes it hard for some french domains to pass the 'radio test'.

 

[theinvestor]

The short answer is usually "plural". In most cases you want to have plural especially when selling a product. For example. I'd prefer having redroses.com over redrose.com ...Simply because a person will always want more than one rose...or one flower...etc.

 

[domainatrix]

Completely depends on the use:

If you are a lawyer, you want your website to be "lawyer.ca". If you have a law firm with many lawyers or are setting up a directory of lawyers across canada, you want "lawyers.ca"

We own "accountants.ca" and will be using it for a directory. If we owned "accountant.ca", we would likely try selling it to an end-user who wants it as their website.

Also a consideration is which one sounds better; some plurals sound much better than the singular version, and vice versa. "realestate.ca" sounds great, but realestates.ca does not...

I guess that means I agree with Hugegrowth; there is no hard and fast rule...

Jen

 

[Irish31]

I'm a bit out of the loop here, but what happened to Overture? It seems to be down, as it done with?

Is there another similar site out there that can do the same thing? Input a keyword and get back the top X relevant search queries?

 

[djallan]

I pretty much see eye to eye with hugegrowth on this one.
Whichever form gets the most searches is of the most interest to me. Of course the plural includes the search word + the "s" so except in cases like realestates (which doesn't make much sense) the plural is often preferred.

I'm a bit out of the loop here, but what happened to Overture? It seems to be down, as it done with?

Is there another similar site out there that can do the same thing? Input a keyword and get back the top X relevant search queries?

Overture hasn't updated since last Jan??
WordTracker has always been my preferred tool cause it differentiates between plural and single keywords and order of words in keyword phrases which Overture never did.