SEO & Google's Good Writing Filter (Penalization)

[chris911]

I read that Google has some kind of good writing / good grammar filter that means that a well written page / article is likely to rank higher in search results, whereas a page with poor grammar / misspellings gets penalized.

Anyone experienced anything like this? Evidence?

Does this mean that attracting search traffic through common mis-spellings can trigger some kind of spam filter? And get a site penalized?

I've a site that's been in Google's sandbox for almost a year. Could some kind of spam based penalty have been applied to the site as it has lots of misspellings?

Advice much appreciated....

[Obelia]

Consider this: highly educated people, or experts in a niche field, will use a lot of rare jargon. To a poor spellchecker their writing would appear to be littered with errors. So in order for this to work Google would have to employ a massive dictionary.

Another issue is what language is being used. Webpages do not always state the correct language in the doctype, and sometimes multiple languages are used on the same page. The writer may want to quote a paragraph in a different language, or link to a translated page using the appropriate language.

In short, there are hurdles for Google to overcome in order to use such a filter. That's not to say that they don't, or that they won't in future, but they would have to put in a lot of work to make it accurate and useful.

However, you should still go ahead and spellcheck. The SiteProNews article notices that good grammar goes hand in hand with high rankings, because it does. People are more likely to link to content that looks as though it's been written with some care.

[WD03DKN]

Yeah i totally agree with Obelia, In my own personal experience, i have written articles which have had poor grammar in the past, and not had much success from them, but i learn't from my mistakes, and now my articles rank well, and get a good response rate.

[lazycat]

I wouldn't be surprised if Google was using some way to pick out complete gibberish on a page but poor grammar and the odd spelling mistake would be a little tougher to justify penalising...anyway, some of my top keywords are misspellings are I'm keeping them!

[mistermix]

Common sense says that a page with good grammer is better than an equal page with bad grammer.

Of course google knows this, no evidence or investigation is required!

[safe6]

Common sense says that a page with good grammer is better than an equal page with bad grammer.

Of course google knows this, no evidence or investigation is required!

[rainborick]

Common sense says that a grammar check would be a large waste of processing cycles in determining relevance and quality, given the variations in idiom and styles around the world. Common sense also says that a spell check would be a similar waste of processing cycles for the same reason, but that misspellings would reduce the rankings of pages simply because the content would no longer match the targeted keywords.

[mistermix]

Originally Posted by rainborick

Common sense says that a grammar check would be a large waste of processing cycles in determining relevance and quality, given the variations in idiom and styles around the world. Common sense also says that a spell check would be a similar waste of processing cycles for the same reason, but that misspellings would reduce the rankings of pages simply because the content would no longer match the targeted keywords.

The morale of the story is always aim to use good grammar.

[bomberman]

Originally Posted by safe6

Common sense says that a page with good grammer is better than an equal page with bad grammer.

Of course google knows this, no evidence or investigation is required!

Agree with safe6. Definitely a good grammar will rank while poor and misspelled words will not. Why? it simply because it's wrong and not the word that people want to search for.

[mopacfan]

Personally I think using a grammar check makes sense. It would help weed out the MFA scrapper sites because they almost always have incomplete sentences due to the scrapper cutting them off.

[chris911]

Mixed opinions then....

I've personally found that using bad grammar (ie. misspellings) to be far more useful, send far more traffic, and result in far more ad clicks than the correctly spelt version of a word.

I'm just wondering, if you overdo such misspellings, does some kind of spam penalty apply? I'm not talking about keyword stuffing - but writing a page's content as I would do normally, but including the target misspelling throughout.

Thoughts?