Is there any way around Google's query rewriting?

[steerpikegg]

I am asking this for a friend who has a major problem with people finding his business on Google. The problem is that his company is called something like :

Widget Plumbing

But Google will always just search for :

Widgett Plumbing unless you specifically tell it not to, which naturally most customers don't.

In Bing he comes up first for his company name, but on Google nowhere at all unless you click on the 'did you mean'

My first inclination is that the only way out of this is to change his company name, which is frankly ridiculous. Does anyone have any ideas of alternatives?

[FranticFish]

This is largely speculation, but I would have thought it depends on how popular 'widget plumbing' (the suggested term) is.

If you establish his brand name firmly on the web, Google will have signals that what they currently view as a mis-spelling of a search term is actually a term in its own right. They might stop rewriting that result.

Another factor that could help is if significant amounts of customers keep correcting them. Google can learn, and a recent thread here reported that suggestions can vary by zip code.

But I would have thought the key factor is the occurrence and demand of the suggested term. The greater the demand for that, the less likely I would have thought that you can do anything about this.

As I said, mostly speculation.

[netmeg]

This is largely speculation, but I would have thought it depends on how popular 'widget plumbing' (the suggested term) is.

That's pretty much how it works. Welcome to MY world.

- not NUTMEG

[goodroi]

mturk might be able to help depending on how big a correction you are looking to make.

[steerpikegg]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

I'll pass this on, but I can see for him it's a right royal pain in the backside.

Establishing the name may be tricky, as we are talking about a small local business. His name is very unique which once would have made it easy to find him, but alas no more.

I wonder what it would take in terms of mturk to do the job. If he did something with that (eg blog posts) would Google not see that as being paid links? Or am I misunderstanding?