Why's this misspelling not ranking?

Google's treatment of misspellings

[Whitey]

I want to rank for a common misspelling and have used the word in the meta title, the content of the pages, internally linked to it , plus put a couple of IBL's in, but somehow we don't seem to rank with consistancy [ unlike other terms ].

Other sites I observe seem to rank well with this note under the "cached page" : "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: search term"

I'm beginning to wonder if Google filters results for misspelled terms, if they have them in the meta title. Any ideas? Should we remove the word from the meta title?

[edited by: tedster at 7:11 am (utc) on June 25, 2007]
[edit reason] anonymize the search term [/edit]

[Robert Charlton]

I want to rank for a common misspelling...

If it's common enough, it may be hard to rank on.

I once optimized a site where the misspellings of the brand name outnumbered the correct spellings by 2-to-1, both in occurrences on the web and in the number of searches.

[Robert Charlton]

I'm beginning to wonder if Google filters results for misspelled terms, if they have them in the meta title. Any ideas? Should we remove the word from the meta title?

Whitey - I'm bumping this up because I really didn't address your question, and it's an intriguing one.

I've just run a few test searches on phrases in market areas where I've noticed I sometimes mis-type one of the words, or where I see on keyword tools that one of the words is often misspelled.

In two word phrases, I see that Google highlights the correctly spelled words as well as typos in the serps... but it highlights the exactly misspellings only in the cached pages. Most, but not all, of the returned pages have only correct spellings in their titles.

If you search for the single word that's misspelled by itself, though, almost all of the returned pages have only the misspellings in their titles.

From this brief check, and looking at the pages themselves, I'd think that if you want to rank for the misspelling of part of a phrase, you'd probably have to be pretty strong for the correct spelling too. That doesn't appear to be the case with the single word searches, where focus on the misspelling alone appears to suffice.

Your observations may differ. I'm curious what you see in the competition to your own word or phrase.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:52 am (utc) on July 2, 2007]

[BillyS]

This is a trick that About uses. They’ve got good ranking for lots of phrases and frequently use a misspelled word or two in the article too.

[netmeg]

I have a client who is a fairly well known public speaker, and there are two common ways to spell his last name. His actual name is the LESS common of the two, and since he gets a lot of correspondence addressed to the alternate spelling, he wanted to make sure he was found for both. We accomplished this on his bio page, by making a somewhat joking reference to how often his name was misspelled, and we also put a similar statement in the meta description. He almost instantly rose to #5 on that spelling (he was already #1 on the real spelling) I might have also included it in parenths (offset by spaces of course) in the title, like this: FNAME LNAME ( ALTNAME )

YMMV.

[Whitey]

Robert - One thing that did perplex me was that the other sites did not even have the misspelling on the page, they only had links pointing to the page.

Maybe Google scores down the strength of pages containing misspellings that try to rank on their own - just a thought.

I'm going to run some tests. On one site we'll leave the misspelling in the meta title, and in the other, we'll remove it. Hopefully it'll reveal some consistancy across the results, one way or another, to indicate if using the misspelling in the meta title is an issue.

[edited by: Whitey at 1:26 am (utc) on July 3, 2007]

[Robert Charlton]

One thing that did perplex me was that the other sites did not even have the misspelling on the page, they only had links pointing to the page.

Whitey - On the various searches I looked at, most of pages ranking did indeed have the misspellings on the page, though a few pages did not.

Additionally, let me repeat... among the pages that ranked for a misspelling in a phrase, there occasionally were titles that included the misspelling.

[vincevincevince]

If Google is aware that the misspelling is a misspelling of the main term, then it will be treated almost as if it were the main term. Do you see 'did you mean to search for correctspelling?' at the top when you search for the misspelling?

Do a search for 'fedral burreau of investigation' and you will see the top matching sites do not have those misspellings, and the 'bold' words are the correctly spelt versions.

Sites being able to rank for mispelling is, after all, a 'bug' in the algorithm because the word has exactly the same meaning and so should be treated exactly the same.

File this one alongside "abbreviations are matched when searching for full terms" - i.e. do a search for 'FBI' and most of the pages which rank are for 'Federal Bureau of Investigation' and not 'FBI'.

[Whitey]

Do you see 'did you mean to search for correctspelling?' at the top when you search for the misspelling?

Yes, i see this which means Google recognises this mispelling - but the issue for me is why the inconsistancies on ranking.
Some have it in the meta title and some don't even have it in the content.

[vincevincevince]

I postulate the following model, as it fits the evidence:

Google sees a misspelt word, and is 80% sure it is a misspelling. In the background, Google does two searches, one for the correct spelling and one for the misspelling, and assigns the relevancies as usual. Google then scales relevancies for the correct spelling results by 80%, and the misspelling results by 20%. Adding them together and then re-ranking gives a 80:20 (4:1) weighted set of results.

In my empirical model, the results you see are thus 80% due to the correct spelling and only 20% due to any presence of the misspelling. Therefore, the misspelt document should be something really relevant to the search term in its own right (i.e. good density, pagerank, etc.) to pull in the serps for the misspelt term.

If, on the other hand, Google isn't so sure that a word is a misspelling, e.g. if there is a 25% chance it's a misspelling, and 75% chance it's some new product with a stupid spelling, then the misspelling's own results will be stronger.