Back in the late 90’ies Sergey Brin and Larry Page suddenly made it difficult for everyone to optimize their own homepage for the search engines. Back then, when the search engines of choice was AltaVista or Yahoo, a different much simpler algorithm found and ordered the relevant search result for the user. These algorithms were primarily based on the number of appearances of the search words. If the user searched for the word “car”, the search engine would display the results ordered by the number of appearances of the search terms (roughly… of course other factors also influenced it ). This meant that it was easy to optimize a homepage to most of the search engines, while it was just about making sure plenty of the desired keywords where represented several times.
When the Google guys launched their pageRank based algorithm, much of this changed. Suddenly the displayed search results were actually relevant, and it was much harder for the average webmaster to get her site to the top of the list.
It was no longer adequate to repeat keywords in the metadata and in the body text of the homepage, to ensure high rankings. Now citation-like rules was applied, that made incoming links to the homepage not only desirable, but necessary.
Now hundreds, maybe thousands, perhaps even billions (well no, definitely not billions) of companies have specialized in Search engine optimization (SEO), in order to milk companies for marketing money. They help optimize companies’ websites in order to gain higher rankings, hence higher profits.
While new rules apply, words and phrases are still essential. The closer match between the phrase and the search terms, the more likely the site is to turn up in the results. The competition for these terms and phrases is thriving, and it can take a lot of time to make sure that the right phrases appear on the sites somewhere, so that it matches with what the users search for. And even then, the combination of words is likely already to be taken by other companies’ sites.
But what about spelling errors? The Google spellchecker has made it very easy for fast typers or literacy-challenged to correct the search terms. Even so I believe that there could be an unexploited market in purposely putting spelling errors on the website. I could imagine most companies would hesitate to deliberately putting spelling errors on their website. It could substantially affect the impression on the company and negatively affect its brand. Nonetheless it could provide positive revenue, by attracting additional search results.
I have conducted a small test, by creating landing pages for a very small website, with keywords based on users actual search terms, instead of predetermined keywords.
Every time a users enters the landing page via a search engine, the search phrase is then looked up in a database, and if I doesn’t already exists, a record is then created. From each of these search term records, a landing page is then created* with the keywords in the url and on the page, and after the page has been crawled by e.g. Google, it will appear in the search results when a user searches for that phrase again.
If a user searches for e.g. the phrase “cheap car dealer”, and among the results my page turns up, and the user clicks it, the phrase will be saved in my database so that a landing page can be generated on this phrase with the url “cheap_car_dealer.html” and the search phrase featured in the metatag ass well as on the site itself. This way, it is likely that my ranking will be higher next time a user searches for this term.
This will have an even stronger effect if this happens with phrases not used much and/or is not likely to appear on competitor’s websites. This could be the phrase “cheep car deeler”, with two misspelled words. While this combination of words doesn’t appear as often as the before mentioned, it is likely that a landing page with this phrase will appear very high, even though its general pageRank is not very high, in a matching search.
By using keywords from the users’ searches, the landing pages are directly created with information provided by the user. If somebody has used a misspelled phrase once, it is likely to happen again sometime. And by then, you have a page matching this exact phrase.
My small test with this automatic keyword addition/landing page creation was done on worldpersonality.com, a site which provides personality test based on the Myers-Briggs type definitions. Out of the top ten keywords from search engines, 7 are misspelled. This test maybe biased, because of the rather difficult-to-spell most common search terms, which are a combination of the names Myers and Briggs.
In the example, the page has been generated from a visit from a search engine with the search term “meyers brigg personality test”: http://worldpersonality.com/meyers_brigg_personality_test.html
These spelling errors on the site generate by far the most traffic. By only using correctly spelled words, it would be very hard to gain a top rank without a lot of incoming links, for this type of site.
As discussed earlier there are pros and cons with this approach. Searching for this approach on the net brings up loads of discussions. The credibility of the site can be damaged, and if an established company, with an established brand uses this approach, it could have a large negative impact. For smaller, relatively unknown sites and companies, the approach can lead to a boost in traffic, at least in the short run.
A mixed approach could also proof desirable. By leaving the type-o’s out of the body text on the page, but leave them in the url where most people don’t look, the site could save some of its credibility. This way the search engine will still have indexed the page and associated it with this exact misspelled phrase, and the user doesn’t necessarily notice. I don’t know how strong a weight the given page will have in the results, with only the matching keyword in the url, but a even a small effect could still mean increased traffic.
By adding spelling errors deliberately, it could clutter up search engines, and generally make too much noise on the net. It might even lead to further illiteracy, while people will think their spelling is correct, while it’s not. In the end it could confuse robots, which will then turn against its creators and start a global battle of man versus machines, which again could lead to the end of the world as we know it.
*Using a dynamic language, and with the power of the apache rewrite module, a new physical file does not need to be created.
Brian Zhang Larsen | 
09 24th, 2008| 
eat08 was a great event, with something for everybody. There was everything, from grilled wild game, sausages and cheese, to fine chocolates and cakes of all sorts. And when all the nice food made the throat dry, there was luxury beer from Danish micro breweries, ecological smoothies and various other niche drinks to calm the thirst with.