Targetting keword/phrase mispellings

[coldgold]

I have a site that is all about widgets. I have created specific pages for
green widgets, blue widgets, red widgets, etc... The are all doing very
well (many in top 10 results) and suck in visitors who then visit many
other areas of my site.

There is very common and popular misspelling of widgets (ie wydgets). It is
very common (even with google spellchecker) for people to search for this
misspelling. I want to capture this traffic. What I have done is to create
a subfolder named 'wydgets' and copied the green, blue, red, and other
widget pages to the directory and replaced widgets with wydgets. I have a
central navigation which I have modified on the wydgets site to link to the
wydgets pages,BUT IT ALSO LINKS TO SOME OF THE 'widgets' pages. I also have
a link from all of widget pages to the wydget home page (linking a small
graphic in the header file used on all pages).

My question: Will I be penalized for this and specifically why? Is there a
better way for me to accomplish capturing the misspelling traffic?

[Marcia]

You could be "cruisin' for a bruisin'" over duplicate content if they're identical except for the spelling. There's been a thread just this week about duplicate content, you might want to dig that out, it's very recent.

It could depend on how competitive it is for the mis-spellings how it'll need to be handled. Are a lot of other people also going after the same mis-spellings?

[Tropical Island]

We have a similar problem with the spelling of our country and regional area.

What we did was create new pages using these mispellings in the titles, descriptions and in the copy of the page. The content is basically the same as our correct entry pages however we changed the photos and the way the content is presented to avoid duplication problems. These pages have been in for over a year and are placed highly for these mispellings.

We did put a comment on the pages advising visitors what the correct spelling was and that the page is there to help them find what they want.

[Monkscuba]

Another method is to get some incoming links to your site, using the misspellings in the anchor text. Or even use the misspellings in the navigation through your site.

Our main "destination" can be spelled several ways and I try to make unique (I say again..UNIQUE) pages that incorporate the alternative/misspellings, rather than make a whole copy of an existing page and change the spelling which sounds like trouble to me...

[pretzelpub]

I've put misspellings in the meta keyword tag and had some success.

I even had one site where the URL was misspelled so many times, i registered the misseplt domain. There are over a dozen sites that link back to our site with that misspelling. If you type in link:www.misspelling.com, however, google shows the same results as if you type link:www.correctspelling.com, Google has conflated the results, realizing they are the same site.

[Mohamed_E]

Another method is to get some incoming links to your site, using the misspellings in the anchor text. Or even use the misspellings in the navigation through your site.

I have a page on "Lakes of the Widgets" (there are clearly two lakes there!), and 80% of the referrals come to "Lake of the Widgets" (singlular lake).

I happen fortuitously to have an appropriate singular word close by (basically goes "on the way to Lakes of the Widgets you pass Lake Gizmo) which is how I initially got those searching for the singular. Now I use "Lake of the Widgets" in the anchor text of my navigation links, the correct plural in the body of the text. Works, I rank #1 for the singular.