Odd meta description behavior on a typo

[youfoundjake]

I noticed a vistor to one of my sites came by the mistyping of a keyword. lets use "exmaple"
through out the whole page, the word is spelled correctly (example), except in the meta description tag, where its spelled exmaple

I rank #4 when it's misspelled, and no where in the top 100 for the correct spelling, but am i correct in thinking that the meta description may be carrying more weight then we initially thought?

[Shaddows]

I would say its more likely you are filtered on "example" but not on "exmaple". Then, as G autocorrects example, you show up. Possibly receiving a tiny bit extra credit for meta description.

Is this a common misspelling, or a bit unusual?

[youfoundjake]

it can be a common misspelling. when the autocorrect kicks in, i don't show up anywhere.
I just find it odd that the search result is based on a meta description word, instead of on page text..

[Receptional Andy]

This may be nothing to do with the meta description, since Google ranks pages with only correctly-spelled instances of the word for incorrectly-spelled searches. This is pretty common behaviour, although I've never pinned down the criteria for sites that are returned, as opposed to those that also spell things correctly but are not returned.

[youfoundjake]

But the incorrectly spelled search word does not appear anywhere on page, only in the meta-description. That's whats confusing about this, it's almost as if a throwback to the days of keyword stuffing in the meta keyword, with all sorts of misspellings. But now it seems like it could be happening with the meta description, even though google "says" that it doesn't help rankings, only click through..but yet I rank higher based on a misspelling in a meta description then i do on a correct spelling in on-page words.

[JS_Harris]

Keywords are next to useless but Title and Description are extremely important. So important is the title in fact that the exact same article will rank very differently depending on what it's called.

widgets, widget, the widget, my widget etc... all VERY different when used in the title, not so much when used in the description and even less when used on page.

My point is that the algo is ranking your page on every keyword and every keyword combination it finds. The filters then reduce and often eliminate your articles value for the majority of those keywords.

example: you misspelled a word. You rank highly for that word, even if it's a meta tag, until your page passes the filters which then confirm that your page is not about the misspelled word at all - the rankings drop.

The filters eventually get a good idea of what your site is about and so it becomes harder to rank for other things outside of what G thinks is your topic. The toughest filter of all exists for page one results imo, if you manage to land on page one you are guaranteed a visit to see if the page is worthy and I believe that this filter is the automatic "flag a human evaluator" type of filter.

It's not a secret that many G employees spend their days sifting through pages and pages and pages... they focus on NEW entries to page one as a priority. When a human evaluator says "nope, you'll get no recognition henceforth for the term "widget" you're done for on that term.

Short version - Google collects and ranks everything, then it filters what it's found... including misspellings in meta tags.

[Receptional Andy]

But the incorrectly spelled search word does not appear anywhere on page, only in the meta-description

But that's what I was saying - you can rank for mis-spellings without the word appearing anywhere on the site, or in external links. So, it doesn't mean your page appears because of the meta description mis-spelling.

[youfoundjake]

But that's what I was saying - you can rank for mis-spellings without the word appearing anywhere on the site, or in external links.

So can we expand that to question why we don't get even more traffic based on misspellings? Bear with me, as this is an odd concept, but I'm still a little confused on how a page can rank on words that aren't even present, isn't that one of the major factors of all search engines, that the keyword be at least present on the page?

[Receptional Andy]

Generally speaking, yes, but most search engines also do something called "query expansion [webmasterworld.com]" which means returning results for things that are not explicitly in a search query. Most commonly, you'll see word-stemming (e.g. webmaster => webmasters => webmastering), but there are a number of other examples.

There seem to be strange criteria at play when a site is returned for mis-spellings - it isn't (as might be expected) the same as results for the correctly-spelled word. It seems to select a different subset of sites for some reason, and doesn't happen with every mis-spelling.