What is Google's position on misspellings?

[Ralph_Slate]

I have a "search" feature on my site, and recently started logging the number of misspellings. I was shocked to see so many - over 1.1 million since November.

I implemented a system of internal redirects for those badly spelled words, but when I searched Google for the misspellings (primarily to use Google to figure out just what the user was searching for), I notice that my site often isn't returned when searched for the misspelled words.

For example, people have searched my site for "chase basily", a hockey player. The name is actually Chase Balisy - the l and the s have been switched in the typo. I have seen about 20-30 variants of that particular misspelling.

If I search Google for [chase basily hockey], Google hasn't yet figured out that this is a typo for Chase Balisy, so I get a few pages which have made a similar spelling error, and my site isn't returned.

I thought it might be a good idea if I placed the misspelled phrase on my page - not cloaked or with an anchor text or anything, but included in a "frequently misspelled as" or "name variant" section so that the word is on the page. The goal, of course, would be that if someone searches Google for something that I know is a frequent misspelling, Google will return my site instead of weaker sites which have just made a mistake on the spelling.

I don't want to cross Google though. Does anyone know if Google will enact a penalty for doing something like this? I can't find any solid guidance on this, other than a suggestion that this could be seen as keyword stuffing.

[goodroi]

Can you still increase your traffic with intentional misspellings? Yes
Is it sustainable and wise long-term? No

Chasing after misspellings is a dying SEO tactic. I would not suggest you spend too much time on this. Your research has probably already discovered that Google keeps improving at identifying spelling mistakes and automatically redirecting users to the SERPs they intended to request. You also want to be careful that you don't damage your brand and scare away users who may think your site is bad info riddled with mistakes.

One possible solution for the hockey play example, is to add a section to your player pages and title that section "Common Name Misspellings" and then automatically populate that box with the data from your internal search box. Users would know you are smart enough to properly spell names, you add the misspellings which can possibly add some short term Google traffic, and it gives your users something else to look at on your page.

In the long term, Google will keep improving their user mistake detection and auto corrections making it not really worth the effort.

[tangor]

Bing is pretty good at detecting these things. "did you mean THIS THING instead of THSI THNIG?"

I wouldn't invest too much time in this, the search engines (most all of them) have more data to sort this out than we will ever see.