Comments on: Misspelled Keywords – Good Luck with That!

By: Soren J

Soren J — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:22:23 +0000

Quote: “There are several ways of accomplishing this, but I believe one of the classiest methods is to simply post an article or blog post on your site that mentions different common misspellings of the desired term”.

Well – what are the other ways then??

Using the common misspellings trick is not an option in many cases, and IMHO it’s a way of indirectly telling the users they’re stupid….

By: Erick

Erick — Tue, 19 May 2009 04:10:57 +0000

This is really optimisation for optimisations sake. I would rather spend the 4 hours I get each week on a clients site getting more traffic to convert.

Think about it, you are talking about targeting <3% on any given keyword, also as users get used to the did you mean feature, Google also has added Chameleon and Spellmeleon furthering this so unless you are one of the top two results, and can be sure you can get there it is wasted effort.

If a website gets 1000 unique visitors per day or 30,000 per month, you are much better spending that time understanding what users are already doing, and improving conversion rate than optimising for misspellings!

Honestly, standalone SEO is dying, from one professional to another, spend more time improving conversion rate, the number of dissatisfied clients I used to have who said to me it is great I rank for that keyword but I haven’t seen any money convinced me 4 years ago that conversion rate is something more tangible and much more profitable.

By: IT Buzz

IT Buzz — Sun, 17 May 2009 18:26:40 +0000

yup that’s really true you can really rank very high when you add misspelled keywords to your articles as no one has ever thought of adding those words to there article’s keywords. Thanks for sharing great information.

By: Another Adam

Another Adam — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:48:27 +0000

I agree. I helped a guy with Circut City a while back. I was amazed at the volume on that term. Although, I’m guessing that it will fade now that they are out of business.

By: Nick of Orion Strategics

Nick of Orion Strategics — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:24:04 +0000

Good article. Misspellings do look like the overlooked low-hanging fruit ripe for the taking. But I would like to add a word of caution.

It’s a risky strategy to spend a lot of energy optimizing for misspelled words – Google’s Webmaster Guidelines clearly states Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It seems Google doesn’t like the idea of people going after traffic for misspelled keywords.

So you may find that one day your site optimized for misspellings doesn’t rank anymore – Google may on a whim decide to punish sites with misspellings just as they do duplicate sites. Right now bad spelling doesn’t seem to be a mortal sin, but that could easily change. You’ll wake up one day and find that Google decided to drop all sites with more than X percent of misspelled words.

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:49:11 +0000

Hey Joe,
I own 2 domains based entirely on common mispellings:
web desin (www.webdesin.net)
car insruance (www.carinsruance.net)

They show up on the first page of google for their respective terms, but I don’t get hardly any traffic. You pretty much have to be 1,2 or 3 to get much traffic for those mispellings because of the google suggest feature.