Typo SERP's - Any Potential?
Roy Schestowitz
if you find out that in the course of 3 days or so you had 91 referrals
from Google for the search term "oogle earth"? It appears to me as if you
stand a better change of attracting visitors for these mistaken, less
competitive SERP's.
I ought to point out that I did not miss out the "G". The capital G is
graphics with alt="g" (
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/06/28/google-earth/ ).
Going back to the point, it seems worthwhile to go for competitive terms,
but use some variations like common typos. Google Earth is only a few weeks
old so I imagine the correct term gets nearly 1 million searches a day.
Roy
Chris Hope
In a lot of cases Google picks up typos when the search is done and you
get the page asking you if you meant to spell it the correct way.
If you're targeting these sort of mispellings then you need to make sure
you are within about the first 5 results so they are actually visible
on screen without scrolling (I'm basing this theory on the assumption
people scan what they can see and then click the correct spelling, but
I may be completely wrong of course).
I've had some unintentional success myself with a mispelling in the
past, and only discovered the typo on the particular site after seeing
it being in the referral log a few times. I did check the SERPs for
that mispelling a few times over the next few weeks but then didn't for
a few months when it slid down the results, so unfortunately I can't
measure the affect of it dropping down the first page of results and
the resulting decrease in referrals. I'll pay more attention next
time :)
--
Chris Hope | www.electrictoolbox.com | www.linuxcdmall.com
David
It can be worthwhile, I got 47 visitors so far this month for
'bisquick recipies' where recipes has an extra i from a Amazon
Customer Review (reviewer spelt Recipe wrong).
Get quite a lot of visitors thanks to those types of mistakes. Without
that one letter I'd be 47 visitors worse off :-)
I don't specifically target misspellings, but would make sense to on
some types of sites, large ones in particular where a lot of pages
target the same SERPs comes to mind.
David
--
Free Search Engine Optimization Tutorial
http://www.seo-gold.com/tutorial/
Roy Schestowitz
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>> I thought this would amuse a few and have an educational bend. What
>> happens if you find out that in the course of 3 days or so you had 91
>> referrals from Google for the search term "oogle earth"? It appears to
>> me as if you stand a better change of attracting visitors for these
>> mistaken, less competitive SERP's.
>>
>> I ought to point out that I did not miss out the "G". The capital G is
>> graphics with alt="g" (
>> http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/06/28/google-earth/ ).
>>
>> Going back to the point, it seems worthwhile to go for competitive
>> terms, but use some variations like common typos. Google Earth is only
>> a few weeks old so I imagine the correct term gets nearly 1 million
>> searches a day.
>
> In a lot of cases Google picks up typos when the search is done and you
> get the page asking you if you meant to spell it the correct way.
What if the results in the page already spell it properly? Perhaps it could
encourge click-throughs. Also, Firefox has Google-friendly features which
for a given highlighted term will bump you on the next Google result.
Likewise if you enter a term rather than an address in the address bar. I
also ought to mention the "I'm Feeling Lucky" buttons.
> If you're targeting these sort of mispellings then you need to make sure
> you are within about the first 5 results so they are actually visible
> on screen without scrolling (I'm basing this theory on the assumption
> people scan what they can see and then click the correct spelling, but
> I may be completely wrong of course).
You are quite right. Having said that, I also lost visits (e.g. "Tugsten
[sic.] 2005" in the title) due to typos. I guess if you cannot fit the
first results page, then you are better off going for variations. That's
the point I was trying to make. A PR4 site about "Linux news", for example,
might be better off renaming itself to "LiNOX News"
> I've had some unintentional success myself with a mispelling in the
> past, and only discovered the typo on the particular site after seeing
> it being in the referral log a few times. I did check the SERPs for
> that mispelling a few times over the next few weeks but then didn't for
> a few months when it slid down the results, so unfortunately I can't
> measure the affect of it dropping down the first page of results and
> the resulting decrease in referrals. I'll pay more attention next
> time :)
Referral logs can be a little scary, don't you think? Spotting your own
typos as well as odd and embarrassing things people search the Net for...
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz
http://Schestowitz.com
www.1-script.com
> Roy
I agree, typos are a quite important SEO venue. Especially for sites that
deal with specialized technical or scientific terms. Even with regular
words one should not forget that most of Internet users these days are not
native English speakers, therefore there has got to be at least ten common
typos for a word with five letters.
There is one problem with actually optimizing for a typo keyword: anything
that you do can be (quite correctly) considered as cloaking by the search
engines. You'd have to build a special page with the typo, and then give
them a link to a good page. This is unless you can live with typos in the
actual body of your page, which is a very bad style indeed.
Sincerely,
Dmitri
http://www.1-script.com/install/
Check out my CGI scripts installation offer
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Big Bill
Witness Google's recent court problems laying claim to Ggoogle etc.
BB
>There is one problem with actually optimizing for a typo keyword: anything
>that you do can be (quite correctly) considered as cloaking by the search
>engines. You'd have to build a special page with the typo, and then give
>them a link to a good page. This is unless you can live with typos in the
>actual body of your page, which is a very bad style indeed.
Not if you do it right.
BB
--
www.kruse.co.uk/ s...@kruse.demon.co.uk
seo that watches the river flow...
--
Fritz M
> In a lot of cases Google picks up typos when the search is done and you
> get the page asking you if you meant to spell it the correct way.
In Roy's "Oogle earth" example, though, Google isn't offering
corrections. Interesting.
I intentionally misspell words on some of my web pages or include
common variations of a word, usually for proper nouns like city names,
restaurants, people and so forth.
RFM
Chris Hope
> Chris Hope wrote:
>
>> In a lot of cases Google picks up typos when the search is done and
>> you get the page asking you if you meant to spell it the correct way.
>
> In Roy's "Oogle earth" example, though, Google isn't offering
> corrections. Interesting.
I was surprised it didn't pick that one up myself. One of the
mispellings I did once was "Freebsie" when the brand name is actually
"Freesbie". Google still hasn't learnt it's an incorrect spelling yet,
and the two sites I have it mispelled on come up within the first few
results. The original site I left with the mispelling (hey why not!)
and the second one I added it in with a note saying it's often
mispelled and had the mispelling. Gets me a bit of traffic each day :)
The funny thing is, when you spell it correctly Google asks if you meant
to search on "frisbie"
> I intentionally misspell words on some of my web pages or include
> common variations of a word, usually for proper nouns like city names,
> restaurants, people and so forth.
--
Chris Hope | www.electrictoolbox.com | www.linuxcdmall.com
www.1-script.com
>>There is one problem with actually optimizing for a typo keyword:
>> anything
>>that you do can be (quite correctly) considered as cloaking by the
>> search
>>engines. You'd have to build a special page with the typo, and then
>> give
>>them a link to a good page. This is unless you can live with typos
>> in the
>>actual body of your page, which is a very bad style indeed.
> Not if you do it right.
> BB
What is *right* though? Use the typos in the text and then add a small
print in the footer that says "this is for you guys who cannot spell
right"? ;-)
Sincerely,
Dmitri
http://www.1-script.com/install/
Check out my CGI scripts installation offer
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Roy Schestowitz
> Big Bill wrote:
>
>
>>>There is one problem with actually optimizing for a typo keyword:
>>> anything
>>>that you do can be (quite correctly) considered as cloaking by the
>>> search
>>>engines. You'd have to build a special page with the typo, and then
>>> give
>>>them a link to a good page. This is unless you can live with typos
>>> in the
>>>actual body of your page, which is a very bad style indeed.
>
>> Not if you do it right.
>
>> BB
>
> What is *right* though? Use the typos in the text and then add a small
> print in the footer that says "this is for you guys who cannot spell
> right"? ;-)
*LOL*
That's an interesting idea. It might work until search engines get mad one
day and decide to annul this word spamming technique. This is just about as
bad as hidden text, is it not? When somebody contacts you about abuse, you
will answer "me?! English? No."
Roy Schestowitz
I hadn't realised what Fritz pointed out until he did. However, Google
corrections are often as naive as one would expect them to be.
A Google index of valid tokens considers 'Oogle' (whatever it may be) to be
a valid word. It also considers 'Earth' to be a valid word. Finding the
correlation between words and proposing corrections based on strings of
words is computationally a hard task. Google Suggest is capable of pairing
(or tupling) words based on the number of results, but if you introduce
this extra dimension of misspellings and consider all possible things that
can go wrong with spelling, you ask for too much. You would not get search
results quickly enough OR, if doing it off-line, you could have Google
spend a lot of computer power optimising searches in this way.
Chris Hope
Compared with the crunching Google does to return the search queries I
don't think the spelling thing would necessarily be all that difficult.
However, I suspect that the way it works is by using some sort of
simple dictionary lookup.
This is a funny Google search that's doing the rounds at the moment
which illustrates the spelling thing (and of course the real reason it
does the suggestion is because there's no ' in isn't):
http://www.google.com/search?q=paris+hilton+isnt+a+whore
Big Bill
>Big Bill wrote:
>
>
>>>There is one problem with actually optimizing for a typo keyword:
>>> anything
>>>that you do can be (quite correctly) considered as cloaking by the
>>> search
>>>engines. You'd have to build a special page with the typo, and then
>>> give
>>>them a link to a good page. This is unless you can live with typos
>>> in the
>>>actual body of your page, which is a very bad style indeed.
>
>> Not if you do it right.
>
>> BB
>
>What is *right* though? Use the typos in the text and then add a small
>print in the footer that says "this is for you guys who cannot spell
>right"? ;-)
>
>Sincerely,
>Dmitri
I hve a page about seo cources that pulls in people. I point out on
the page that they were probably looking for seo courses and point
them at my page for that. I get traffic from it, not a lot, but it's a
niche term. It's still targetted traffic. That's the term I couldn't
think of last night, targetted traffic.
Big Bill
With most of you it's true! I feel I need a native guide in here some
days!
Mikkel Møldrup-Lakjer
news:dbkia3$1m0f$2...@godfrey.mcc.ac.uk...
> www.1-script.com wrote:
>>
>> What is *right* though? Use the typos in the text and then add a small
>> print in the footer that says "this is for you guys who cannot spell
>> right"? ;-)
>
> *LOL*
>
> That's an interesting idea. It might work until search engines get mad one
> day and decide to annul this word spamming technique. This is just about
> as
> bad as hidden text, is it not? When somebody contacts you about abuse, you
> will answer "me?! English? No."
I cannot follow you at all. Nothing to do with word spamming - it is just
helping people who cannot spell to find a relevant page.
Mikkel
Roy Schestowitz
What Dmitri jokingly suggested was a large bunch of pages like:
[GOOGLE MOON]
Google have just introduced...
...more text here...
---------FOOTER---------
For those who cannot spell: mun, moun, mune, oogle, moogle, shmoogle
I don't think crawlers will perceive this with a good eye. Keywords,
however, would be a cleaner SEO technique.
Roy
Mikkel Møldrup-Lakjer
>
> What Dmitri jokingly suggested was a large bunch of pages like:
>
> [GOOGLE MOON]
>
> Google have just introduced...
>
> ...more text here...
>
> ---------FOOTER---------
> For those who cannot spell: mun, moun, mune, oogle, moogle, shmoogle
>
>
>
> I don't think crawlers will perceive this with a good eye. Keywords,
> however, would be a cleaner SEO technique.
Allright, now I do follow you.
I am myself thinking of how I can include the search 'Guatamala' on my site
which is about 'Guatemala'.
Mikkel
www.1-script.com
> What Dmitri jokingly suggested was a large bunch of pages like:
> [GOOGLE MOON]
> Google have just introduced...
> ....more text here...
> ---------FOOTER---------
> For those who cannot spell: mun, moun, mune, oogle, moogle, shmoogle
> I don't think crawlers will perceive this with a good eye. Keywords,
> however, would be a cleaner SEO technique.
Hey Roy,
No the joke actually went backwards ;-) What I was thinking was this:
[GUGLE MUN]
Commemorating 36th anniversary of the MUN landing, GUGLE have just
introduced...
..more text of the same weird type...
------------FOOTER------------
For those who can't spell right: GUGLE is actually GOOGLE, and MUN is
MOON. Have a great day.
I mean, I don't know if I myself would put something like that onto one of
my sites ;-), but I don't see it as keyword spamming either. From Google
Bot's AI standpoint GUGLE is a keyword, and GOOGLE is also a keyword.
Granted, GOOGLE should have more weight since it's spelled correct, but
GUGLE, as long as it's used on some pages, should have some weight too
(and MUCH less competition)
Sincerely,
Dmitri
http://www.1-script.com/install/
Check out my CGI scripts installation offer
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Roy Schestowitz
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>
>> What Dmitri jokingly suggested was a large bunch of pages like:
>> [GOOGLE MOON]
>> Google have just introduced...
>> ....more text here...
>> ---------FOOTER---------
>> For those who cannot spell: mun, moun, mune, oogle, moogle, shmoogle
>> I don't think crawlers will perceive this with a good eye. Keywords,
>> however, would be a cleaner SEO technique.
>
> Hey Roy,
>
> No the joke actually went backwards ;-) What I was thinking was this:
>
> [GUGLE MUN]
> Commemorating 36th anniversary of the MUN landing, GUGLE have just
> introduced...
> ..more text of the same weird type...
> ------------FOOTER------------
> For those who can't spell right: GUGLE is actually GOOGLE, and MUN is
> MOON. Have a great day.
*LOL*
> I mean, I don't know if I myself would put something like that onto one of
> my sites ;-), but I don't see it as keyword spamming either. From Google
> Bot's AI standpoint GUGLE is a keyword, and GOOGLE is also a keyword.
> Granted, GOOGLE should have more weight since it's spelled correct, but
> GUGLE, as long as it's used on some pages, should have some weight too
> (and MUCH less competition)
They say that if you don't get listen to, you should shout. I guess speaking
gibberish would have the same effect more or less.
===
Speaker: Can anybody explain to me what Google is?
Audience attendant #1: Google is a search engine
Audience attendant #2: Google are a company from California
Audience attendant #3: It's Brin and Page
Audience attendant #4: Google is the search department of Microsoft
===
Which answer will you remember best after the session?
catherine yronwode
>
>
> I am myself thinking of how I can include the search 'Guatamala' on
> my site which is about 'Guatemala'.
>
> Mikkel
Make it part of your text, NOT a footnote -- you want it right at
the top of the page.
The nation of Guatemala (often misspelled
Guatamala by Americans) is located in
Central America.
That is simple, direct, and actually *useful* SEO!!!
Cordially,
cat yronwode
Lucky Mojo Curio Co. http://www.luckymojo.com/catalogue
Roy Schestowitz
> "Mikkel Møldrup-Lakjer" wrote:
>>
>>
>> I am myself thinking of how I can include the search 'Guatamala' on
>> my site which is about 'Guatemala'.
>>
>> Mikkel
>
> Make it part of your text, NOT a footnote -- you want it right at
> the top of the page.
>
> The nation of Guatemala (often misspelled
> Guatamala by Americans) is located in
> Central America.
>
> That is simple, direct, and actually *useful* SEO!!!
>
> Cordially,
>
> cat yronwode
My new most popular page...
Wenger (often named Wagner) heads Arsenal (often mispelled Arsinal) in
Football (soccer to Americans) League (pronounced Lig).
Roy
Dustin
I suppose you could put the text in parenthesis in span tags and then
hide them using CSS right?
--
Dustin Davis
Freelance Portal: http://www.nerdlance.com
Roy Schestowitz
It is considered to be spamming if done purely for the purpose of SEO.
Hiding of content is a feature to be designated for other purposes, e.g.
omission of site menu when printing. WordPress.org got banned because of
that. However, I ought to also mention that the same hidden text linked to
spammy content with AdSense on it. It's hard to tell what it is that 'hit
the sirens'.
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz "Seeing bad movies only encourages them"
http://Schestowitz.com
Mikkel Møldrup-Lakjer
> Hiding of content is a feature to be designated for other purposes,
> e.g.
> omission of site menu when printing. WordPress.org got banned because
> of
> that.
Because of what exactly?
> However, I ought to also mention that the same hidden text linked to
> spammy content with AdSense on it. It's hard to tell what it is that
> 'hit
> the sirens'.
I use a css with
.menu {
display: none
}
for printing. Can't imagine any problems with that.
Mikkel
Dustin
> It is considered to be spamming if done purely for the purpose of SEO.
> Hiding of content is a feature to be designated for other purposes, e.g.
> omission of site menu when printing. WordPress.org got banned because of
> that. However, I ought to also mention that the same hidden text linked to
> spammy content with AdSense on it. It's hard to tell what it is that 'hit
> the sirens'.
>
> Roy
Well then, is there a tag that would work similar to the <acronym> tag
(since I don't thing the acronym tag is appropriate here) that could
give you this additional info in a pop-up text when you mouse over the word?
Roy Schestowitz
> "Roy Schestowitz" <newsg...@schestowitz.com> skrev i en meddelelse
> news:df1h8a$2v3o$1...@godfrey.mcc.ac.uk...
>> Hiding of content is a feature to be designated for other purposes,
>> e.g.
>> omission of site menu when printing. WordPress.org got banned because
>> of
>> that.
>
> Because of what exactly?
They (Matt Mullenweg and affiliates) disguised links to home insurance and
related stuff at the bottom of each page. The pages that were linked to
contained SE spam. Either way, Matt expressed his regrets and I felt hurt
when I saw him come under fire. He was simply messing with the wrong
people.
>> However, I ought to also mention that the same hidden text linked to
>> spammy content with AdSense on it. It's hard to tell what it is that
>> 'hit
>> the sirens'.
>
> I use a css with
>
> .menu {
> display: none
> }
>
> for printing. Can't imagine any problems with that.
>
> Mikkel
No problem at all. Excellent (and classic) design practice.
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz "Avoid missing ball for higher score"
http://Schestowitz.com
Roy Schestowitz
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> > It is considered to be spamming if done purely for the purpose of SEO.
>> Hiding of content is a feature to be designated for other purposes, e.g.
>> omission of site menu when printing. WordPress.org got banned because of
>> that. However, I ought to also mention that the same hidden text linked
>> to spammy content with AdSense on it. It's hard to tell what it is that
>> 'hit the sirens'.
>>
>> Roy
>
> Well then, is there a tag that would work similar to the <acronym> tag
> (since I don't thing the acronym tag is appropriate here)...
<abbr title="explanation">word or acronym</abbr>
> ...that could
> give you this additional info in a pop-up text when you mouse over the
> word?
There are some on-the-fly advertisement methods that use JavaScript to
achieve this effect. You can extend titles, abbr and acronym using the more
appealing "Nice Titles" (do a Web search, I think it's from some guys in
MIT). You can extend the markup perhaps and do some hacking on Nice Titles
if you want something richer, but bear in mind that Nice Titles is based on
CSS and JavaScript, so browser compatibility would be limited.
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
http://Schestowitz.com
Mikkel Møldrup-Lakjer
>
> They (Matt Mullenweg and affiliates) disguised links to home insurance
> and
> related stuff at the bottom of each page. The pages that were linked
> to
> contained SE spam. Either way, Matt expressed his regrets and I felt
> hurt
> when I saw him come under fire. He was simply messing with the wrong
> people.
What was the purpose of disguising links? To give PR to those pages?
By the way, I just upgraded my SearchStatus-bar for Firefox to version
1.9. It now has a feature which highlights alle re="nofollow" links on
each page. Excellent tool.
Before, when I was saying I had Alexis bar installed, I was actually
talking about the Alexis feature on SearchStatus. Maybe this feature is
without the spyware of Alexis.
Mikkel
Roy Schestowitz
> "Roy Schestowitz" <newsg...@schestowitz.com> skrev i en meddelelse
> news:df1jtf$2voc$4...@godfrey.mcc.ac.uk...
>>
>> They (Matt Mullenweg and affiliates) disguised links to home insurance
>> and
>> related stuff at the bottom of each page. The pages that were linked
>> to
>> contained SE spam. Either way, Matt expressed his regrets and I felt
>> hurt
>> when I saw him come under fire. He was simply messing with the wrong
>> people.
>
> What was the purpose of disguising links? To give PR to those pages?
The visitors were surely interested in a blogging tool and not 150,000 pages
on home insurance et cetera. That's why the links were hidden.
> By the way, I just upgraded my SearchStatus-bar for Firefox to version
> 1.9. It now has a feature which highlights alle re="nofollow" links on
> each page. Excellent tool.
Really?!?! I didn't even know about a new version of it. Thanks for pointing
that out. I'll get it in a minute.
> Before, when I was saying I had Alexis bar installed, I was actually
> talking about the Alexis feature on SearchStatus. Maybe this feature is
> without the spyware of Alexis.
>
> Mikkel
I think that the A9 toolbar is spying on me, but I can't be sure. It sure
keeps track of visited pages and accumulates history if I let it...
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz "Turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie"
http://Schestowitz.com