Spelling mistakes can have a negative effect on the positions of your web pages in Google’s search results. In addition to this, there are many more quality signals that Google checks on your web pages.
Is it really important to avoid spelling mistakes?
Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed in a video, that the number of spelling mistakes correlates with the PageRank of a website:
“We noticed a while ago that, if you look at the PageRank of a page – how reputable we think a particular page or site is – the ability to spell correlates relatively well with that. So, the reputable sites tend to spell better and the sites that are lower PageRank, or very low PageRank, tend not to spell as well.”
This does not mean that Google uses this as a ranking signal. However, Google’s latest “Panda” algorithm update indicates that Google considers several quality signals when ranking web pages.
Which quality signals are checked by Google?
When Google released the first Panda update, they also released a list of questions that can help you to judge the quality of your site:
- Does the article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
- How much quality control is done on content?
- Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
- Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
- Does the article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
- Would you expect to see the article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
- Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
- Does the article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
- Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
- Does the article describe both sides of a story?
- Does the article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
What you have to do now
If you want to make sure that your web pages get high rankings on Google, you have to make sure that your web pages contain high quality content.
Low-quality content on some parts of your website can impact the whole site’s rankings. Remove low quality pages and improve the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages.
Analyze your web pages to make sure that Google can give them high rankings. If Google finds the right content on your web pages, your website will get high rankings.
Article by Axandra SEO software
Related articles
- Google: Low PageRank & Bad Spelling May Go Hand-In-Hand; Panda, Too? by @mattmcgee (searchengineland.com)
- 5 Page Quality Indicators That Can Outweigh PageRank (searchenginepeople.com)
- Oh No! What Happened To My PageRank? by @rustybrick (searchengineland.com)
1 thought on “How spelling mistakes influence your rankings on Google”
An excellent
article Graham; as someone who attended, a grammar school, an establishment now
considered “politically incorrect”, the importance of spelling has remained
with me for over 50 years.
Much criticism
is levelled at learning by rote but in fact I’m sure that the hours spent reciting
spelling lists at home before being tested the next day at school have been
completely validated.
For the majority
of people the comfort of reading is the smooth continuity of well crafted
sentences and the sudden appearance of a spelling error can jolt them from the rhythm
of the text, but that is not the only problem.
It seems that
Google is now taking charge of the spelling tests and the consequences of
getting them wrong is no longer punished by writing the corrected versions out
in detention but results in a truly negative effect on how your website is
ranked and its impact extending to your business.
With technology
on our side and spell-checkers on word processing software I find it incredible
that people still publish websites and blogs with abundant basic spelling
errors.
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