Art Of Money

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There’s money in being unable to spell!

If you have even a tinge of gray on your SEO cap, you probably know this fact very well. Black hatters can make a fortune from optimizing a page for each of an infinite number of words and spelling combinations that no sane webmaster would be caught dead having on their site. The point then of this article is to explore the possibility of increasing traffic to your site by the technique of targeting misspelling and typos in a manner that won’t get your site banned from the search engines.

Webmaster Folklore

There is a webmaster’s urban myth that using misspelling on your site can cause it to be banned by Google. Since the technique of targeting misspelling has, to this point, been mostly employed by search engine spammers, it is my theory that the belief that Google would ban a site for having incorrect word variations stems largely from the fact that the spam sites are constantly getting banned.

But it is the fact that those sites are zero value added to the searcher that is causing them to be banned, not the misspellings. In fact, the concept of targeting misspellings falls into the realm of sound marketing rather than deceptive tactic. Usually this type of marketing is done via AdWords, but does it have to be?
Search Engine Marketing 101

A customer walks into a bookstore and says to the clerk, “I’m looking for one of those, um, things, um, you know, you open and it has words…”

Clerk, “A book?”

“That’s it!”

Clerk, “Is there any particular subject you’re interested in?”

“Uh, ya, that code book…something to do with Michelangelo’s friend. And Jesus…it’s got the Bible in it.”

Clerk, “The Bible?”

Wait, I’ve got it written down. The client pulls out a piece of paper. On it is scribbled De Venti’s Core

Clerk, “The Da Vinci Code?”

“That’s it!”

That’s the real[ish] world, now let’s try the same scenario online. A searcher types in De Venti’s Core and now you have to figure out that he wants The Da Vinci Code and you don’t get to ask any more questions.

This is one of the reasons why search engine spam pays. A spammer opens up a keyword tool, types in Da Vinci Code and gets a list of 10,000 variations and churns out an optimized page for each one of them. He catches and monetizes all the traffic that regular webmasters are, wisely, too proud to target.

The Dilemma

“The search engines definitely won’t penalize you for misspellings, but the people who read you site will.” - Jill Wallen

Let’s back up a step before we tackle the dilemma of how to grab the searchers who failed 7th grade and ask one other question…is there enough traffic to make it worth it to target this group?

Some of the estimates I’ve seen say that between 10 to 20% of all searchers either misspell words or enter typos into the search box. Currently the search engines don’t have the kind of intelligence to automatically correct the searcher, so the best they can do is offer “did you mean: corrected word.” Granted some people will use that link, but lots don’t.

To me, 10% of your target audience is way too big of a number to neglect. And the percentage may be bigger than that. Let’s expand the scope of the misspelling concept a bit and use “word variations” instead. Now we have a more complete list of possible holes in our search engine marketing net:

• Typos. Transposed letters, doubled letters, missed letters, substituting letters that are nearby on the keyboard. There are many tools online for creating lists of these by entering a root word.
• Foreign Version of the Keyword. Many folks will search for a word using a common foreign variation, even though they are fine with reading a webpage in English. The Google toolbar offers a “translate” feature that allows you to mouseover your keyword and it displays the translated variations. Some of the popular keyword tools also offer this type of service.
• Ambiguous Versions. Words like ‘website’ and ‘email’ are often searched for as ‘web site’ and ‘e-mail’ or ‘e mail’. A good keyword tool will find these alternative versions for you.
• Misspellings. Caused by ADD in primary school and MS Word’s spell checker…a growing trend of spelling incompetence and typing lethargy in our society could be capitalized on. You can find lists of commonly misspelled words on Wikipedia, etc. but they all reek of off-line misspellings, compiled from student essays and they will often miss the ones that show up in the more casual environment of the search term entry box.

The Prize

The prize then is at least a 10 to 20% increase in targeted traffic to your site. Undervalued and un-served traffic: the best kind. Before heading down the potentially slippery slope of targeting word variations, you could make a giant list of all the possible word variations and throw them into a traffic estimator of some kind. Then you’ll know if it’s worth it to target any of them.

When evaluating the potential of this technique don’t forget that you’re going after the long tail here. Including pretty much anything that has been searched for at least once in the past month or so would be reasonable, depending on how deep you want to go with the concept.

Conquering the Dilemma

Risk vs. Reward. All of the ideas I’m about to present involve some measure of risk. From risk of your customers thinking you have lost your mind, as Jill pointed out in her quote above, to the risk of using some black hat technique that could get your site banned from the search engines.

An important consideration that a lot of folks overlook when doing an evaluation of risk is the risk of doing nothing. In this case that risk is equal to having 10 to 20% of your potential visitors land on your competitors’ sites. Now let’s move on to the possibilities.

In Plain Site. Put a few word variations on your pages. Let’s just toss this one out because it is the most obvious, you may get some more traffic, but your visitors will probably disrespect you. Yes it should be sight…that was an example, did you catch it?

Pure Black Hat. Build a highly optimized page for each word on your word variations list. Using cloaking show those pages to the search engine bots, but when a real browser requests the page, serve them the more appropriate page on your site. This technique is against Google’s webmaster’s guidelines and if you get caught you’ll be back working at McDonalds. Not recommended unless you consider your website and your domain name “disposable” and you love saying, “would you like fries with that?”

Is There Anything Viable Here?

There are two methods that could be tried to get the extra traffic and avoid charges of insanity and hopefully avoid being banned from the search engines.

Get Gray. The first method borrows from the black hatters but uses their techniques in a low risk manner. The technique we’re borrowing is the concept of the ‘disposable website.’ Black hatters don’t have any fear of having a website banned from Google because they just register a new .info domain and put it back online again. Point a link at it to get it re-indexed and it’s “game on.”

One gray hat approach is to register an alternate domain, any domain with the keywords, spelled correctly, find a decent template and build a quick site on it; the more searches there are on the word variations on your list, the more effort will be justified on this site.

Optimize a page for every misspelling and word variation on your list. Now instead of putting AdSense on this site like a real spammer would, design the site so that a “conversion” is a click-through to the appropriate page on your clean site, or a sign up to your real site’s newsletter.

Don’t get conversion rate greedy here, you’ll need to have outbound links to other sites to make your pseudo spam believable. You will also want to host these sites on a separate server, with a different IP address and register the domain in a different name to reduce any obvious connection to the primary site.

The David Letterman Approach. This is my favorite method of capturing the word variation market. If Web 2.0 is defined by collaboration and [cough] AJAX pizzazz, then I’m hoping Web 3.0 will be the era when we webmasters will openly reveal the manipulations of the searcher and the search engines to the searchers.

I’m dating myself here [yes, eight track tape players were real, not just invented to be the brunt of bad jokes], but in the early eighties, David Letterman revolutionized television by pulling back the veil between the illusion of a TV show and the reality of a TV show. I remember how refreshing it was when I first saw him throw a piece of paper at the camera or talk to his producer in the middle of the show, or dash off into the audience for the first time. This stuff is taken for granted now, but back then it was wildly original, even live shows didn’t do things like that.

Can you bring this tangent back to the topic please! Oh sorry…my point with the David Letterman story is actually very simple. Currently I’m testing my own version of Web 3.0. How about putting the appropriate spelling mistakes and word variations at the bottom of your related regular pages? A simple resource box with a title like “this page also targets:” and then a list of all the word variation terms that have a decent amount of searches.

Of course this will raise the question of why these terms are their in the minds of our visitors. So let’s answer the question for them. I add the text “why are these phrases here?” with a hyperlink to a special page on my site which explains the basics of search engine marketing and gives an example like my The Da Vinci Code book example above. It is my belief, and gamble, that most people will understand exactly why you are doing it and will even think you’re quite clever, if you tell them the truth.

I know being told the truth always works for me. Even your Seventh grade teacher would probably cut you some slack. Welcome to my version of Web 3.0.

Disclaimer: I don’t claim to know for certain that search engines won’t penalize you for deliberately including spelling mistakes on your pages or creating a feeder site of misspellings. I did email Google webmaster’s support and posed the question to them directly, but I did not receive a reply. So use any techniques mentioned above at your own risk.