One of the things that I admire about the Google algo is it’s ability to “learn” and “adapt” based on incoming data. For example when search volume for a certain keywords reaches a certain volume words that were originally mis-spellings become real words. Today I came across an example of this logic being applied to site links.
For example look at the SERP for the word [tia’s] you’ll notice no site links
Now search for [tias] without the apostrophe and site links appear
Your first thought might be it’s just the apostrophe, but that’s not the case [victorias secret] and [victoria’s secret] both have site links
Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that people are lazy, and searches without the apostrophe are usually going to have more volume than searches with the apostrophe
While there isn’t enough search volume to get on the graph in the US and Canada you can see a teeny tiny red bar if you squint. Now when we compare [tias] with and without the apostrophe we get a similar graph, but the news graph on the bottom has both data sets.
However when we compare [victorias secret] with [tias] the volume delta is easy to spot, especially if you narrow it down to just the US (most of tias volume was non US)
So my working theory is, unless your name/brand is going to generate significant volume, keep apostrophes and other punctuation (like hyphens) out of your company name and domain name. Especially if you want to ever get site links.
