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Misspellings

To err is human, and all too common it would seem. For example Google ran a project to analyze misspellings of the first name of "Britney Spears", a singer, over a three month period from information provided by their spelling correction system. <see: http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html>. Over 20% of the queries were incorrectly spelt with the two most common errors, brittany and brittney, covering around 16% of searches. Assuming people don't accept the correction suggested by Google or Yahoo! that is an awful lot of searches going somewhere. Britney Spears may not the easiest name to spell, there is an urban legend that her parents named her after the province of Brittany in Western France where they had once taken a vacation but didn't know how to spell the name correctly.

Not all errors are misspellings. Some are good old fashioned typos, these commonly involve forgotten letters and reversed letter pairs in a word. Words such as traslation instead of translation and eihgt instead of eight.

There are two ways we can use misspellings. We can register domains for misspellings of popular keywords, brands and existing domain names in the hope of piggy-backing off other people's SEO efforts. This borders on cyber-squatting and is strictly a black-hat technique. This also has the corollary that if we are going to invest money establishing a domain name we should also consider registering common misspellings in addition to registering in different countries to protect our brand. This can begin to cost quite a bit of money in registration fees and is only worthwhile for well funded sites.

As an example, common misspellings of the domain: google.com are gogle.com, googel.com and goolge.com. All of these redirect to Google's home page. Google missed a few though. Googl.com, www.gpogle.com and goolgle.com redirect to sites totally unrelated to Google and would appear to exist simply to profit from the Google brand.

Misspellings can also be incorporated into the content of pages. I recently noticed that a lot of searches to a site I manage used a common misspelling. This occurred in a couple of places in the text and because it was a proprietary term it was not found by the spell checker built into some search engines. I was about to fix the page when I decided to check out the Wordtracker and Overture databases to see how many people searched on the correct and incorrect spelling. I was surprised to find that the misspelling was actually more popular. Checking Google and Yahoo! it was clear that most websites spelt the term correctly so my page had risen to number one in the search results because it was well optimized and there was very little competition.

It is fairly easy to come up with misspellings for your target keywords. Try reversing letter combinations, missing letters or using letters close to each other on the keyboard. As an example the letters R and T may get substituted. Phonetic spellings are also common as our friend Ms Spears demonstrates. Before creating pages full of misspellings you should check out whether anyone uses the terms, Overture and Wordtracker are your friends. then see how much competition there is from orthographically challenged web masters. Wikipedia and the Cornell library, amongst other resources, have data on commonly misspelt words:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misspellings

http://www.library.cornell.edu/tsmanual/TSSU/comis1.html

Forums are also a source of common misspellings for specialized areas. In skiing many Anglophones spell the French resort Courchevel as Courcheval.

Incorporating misspellings into web pages is more challenging. Having a site full of spelling mistakes won't impress visitors and potential advertisers much. It would be possible to use techniques such as entry pages which send the user to the correct version of the page. Search engines may see this as a black-hat technique although if the content of the real and entry pages are identical it is really providing a service to the end user. If you website is database driven you could take a list a common misspellings, words such as effect spelt as affect, and automatically generate duplicate content pages substituting misspellings for the real words. With the introduction of spell checking of queries by search engines the effects will be somewhat diluted. Google for one also seems to be aware of common misspellings and language differences (e.g. color and colour) and indexes pages with alternate versions of words.

You could also use inbound-links with misspellings in the anchor text. Given the value of good inbound-links this technique should be used sparsely although some kind of internal, search engine friendly, site map with major misspellings could be an idea.

Not directly related to search engine optimization are users that mistype Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), either directly into the browser address bar or webmasters who make errors with links. A typo will generate an error on the web server commonly known as a 404 error after its HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) code. It is a good idea to trap these errors and redirect the user either to the home page or to a site map so they can try to find the right link. As part of this process it is also possible to spell check the URL to try and locate the correct resource name. Filters such as mod_speling for Apache and URLSpellCheck for Microsofts IIS can provide a simple: "did you mean X?" type of correction.

Misspellings

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