Referalls are all for Misspellings

[thinker]

Google sends me misspelled traffic for a competitive phrase. The site is less than 3 months old, and already ranking well for many phrases/keywords, but the competitive phrase only receives traffic from incorrectly spelled queries.

Is Google just testing my website for that phrase or ?

[tedster]

This kind of thing was also reported last fall [webmasterworld.com] - and who really knows the reasons outside Google's walls? It certainly could be a way of testing how well a new url performs for that kind of user intention.

It sounds like you're doing well if you get decent search traffic to a site that is online for only 3 months. Keep us posted if you suddenly are ranking for the proper spelling too, please!

[whoisgregg]

It could be that you've had someone link to your site with incorrectly spelled anchor text. A run through your backlinks might be helpful.

[thinker]

There are more variations of misspellings in my referrals than I have incoming links. So I'm sure it's not an anchor text issue. I think G is doing it intentionally.

If this is a test, hopefully the site will get a passing grade :-). I will keep you posted.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

I worked on a site last year which used to rank for a misspelled word, while we had nowhere mentioned that word on the page. After checking thoroughly, I found that the developer had named the page with the spelling mistake and that might have been the reason for its ranking.

We created a new page with correct spelling and new content however also kept the old page as it used to get really high traffic to our website. The original keyword was really competitive while we found that most of the people in this short messaging age were used to that wrong spelling with lesser competition.

I am still struggling to get on page #1 for that correct keyword while the incorrect one is doing pretty well both in ranking and traffic

[edited by: AnkitMaheshwari at 12:19 pm (utc) on April 2, 2009]

[thinker]

AnkitMaheshwari, did you lose you rankings for misspellings when Google added the spellchecker/Did you mean keyword... feature?

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Google still shows my website, however, the two listing that Google now-a-days shows along with 'did you mean' do come and take up first two position.
Though I rank third and still get traffic for misspelled keyword. I am hoping that some day the 'did you mean result' would also have my correct spell word URL :)