Site only ranks well for misspellings - is this a penalty?

[fireclock]

I think my site is under a google penalty. I am not sure what is the exact term for the penalty.

I will describe the problem, I am trying to rank for a keyword phrase "keyword location" I am currently on 3rd page. But the funny thing is that if I mispelled the keyword phrase on any form, I will be ranked 1st. You could take out any alphabet or interchange any alphabet from the word "location" and the site will rank number 1 (I tried almost 20 different combinations) and it all came out No. 1. I have no mispelled words in my site. that's why I am convince I am under a penalty.

Does anyone know what kind of penalty is it and how to get out of it?

[edited by: tedster at 7:57 pm (utc) on Aug. 20, 2009]

[Receptional Andy]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, fireclock :)

If you're just looking for a way to improve your situation, then you just need to attract links to your page. The right links forgive most sins on Google. If they're right ;)

If you have decent links, then you likely have a content problem. Revise the content you have and look at the ways you link to it. See what impact that has on Google's interpretation of the relevance of your pages.

[tedster]

It is common for Google to send traffic for misspellings to sites that do not yet rank well for the correctly spelled term. You might suspect a penalty if you used to rank well, and those good rankings went away. But if you've never been higher than third page, you probably just have stronger competitors.

Since you're using a "location" keyword, the correctly spelled search results are strongly into Google's Local Search algorithms. That's a whole different planet from more ordinary keywords.