Misspellings downgraded

[superclown2]

Forgive me if this has been covered before but I've just noticed a strange anomoly. If I type in a certain "keyword1 + misspelled keyword2" phrase I am served up 8 (spammy) results but if I type in "keyword1 + misspelled keyword2 + keyword3" I get thousands of results and the sites that appeared in the first search are nowhere. The cached results claim that "mispelled keyword2" only appears in links pointing to these sites but I've searched through hundreds of links and I can't find any! Clearly G is factoring in an allowance for accidental mispellings. Is this something new or has it been noticed for a while? And where are these terms that only appear in links pointing to these pages coming from?

[tedster]

Clearly G is factoring in an allowance for accidental mispellings. Is this something new or has it been noticed for a while?

I've been seeing this for quite a while, years I think, but google is getting better at it as time goes on. Here's a related active thread that might be of interest:
Why's this misspelling not ranking? - Google's treatment of misspellings [webmasterworld.com]

And where are these terms that only appear in links pointing to these pages coming from?

That can be quite a mystery at times, especially because Google's link: operator only gives us a short sampling of all the backlinks they've indexed.

[superclown2]

This result seems to work for all common mispellings and in every case the cached result states that the term is present in incoming links only. If I try a completely unlikely misspelling it doesn't happen and only sites containing that misspelling come up. It looks almost as though a site ranking highly for a given search term is also credited with incoming links for all common mispellings too, whether or not those inlinks exist. Incidentally I've checked links through Y rather than G, they are far more accurate in my experience.