Professionalism and Rankings

Does google give consideration to how well an article was written in SERPs?

For example:

I was travelling to the store the other day when a bus passed by.

vs

I had been walkin to the store when I seen a bus go by.

If it looks like forum talk or kid talk, is it ranked lower?

 

Not because of the talk, but because of the search KW used perhaps. If your target audience searches in slang, then yes, you better make sure your indexed pages contain those words and you SEO for slang.

Otherwise, Google couldn't care less. It won't penalize you. They're not that advanced yet anyway that they can identfy between 100's of different dialects etc.

 

For poor grammar? No the search engines don't seem to care a bit. Keyword density though as mentioned above may factor in. If you use slang or mispell a word obviously that will impact the potential affect of those words in searches... sometimes to a benefit. For instance, I had a new site where I had mispelled the word "lawyers" as "laywers" and noticed it first in my referral logs as I was getting traffic via other people who mispelled this word when typing a bit too fast...

 

interesting...I suppose all that should have been obvious to me but I guess we don't all 'get' everything right away. Thank you both for your input.

 

search engines may not be a fan of intentionally heavily misspelled content. the best way to build lots of it in a natural way is a community type site such as a forum.

 

I wouldn't necessarily optimize for bad grammar or bad expressions, because I would imagine that Google's technology is going to improve in the long-term, so that they'll be able to detect bad grammar.
Maybe that won't affect you right now, but I would always look in the future.

On the other hand, as mentioned by other members above, if your potential visitors often use poor grammar in their search requests, you should definitely optimize for those terms!

 

Decided to re-hatch this thread... I think Aaron is right here. The site I had referred to - lawyers, laywers spelling issue is now slipping in the rankings noticeably and my overall traffic is down. Seems to correlate with me intentionally optimizing the site for the mispelling. Thankfully its not exactly a site that's very near and dear to me or the bulk of my work - more of an experiment...

Anyhow, I think if you have a mispelling maybe once in just body text - or in my case it was once in the title that might work for a bit, but overall I totally see the logic that content with lots of spelling issues is likely to be lower-quality. I'd say def. don't overdo it like I did, and probably don't do it at all. Sort of a long-shot experiment type of deal that didn't work so much...

 

If you type in a mispelled word, Google asks you if you meant <insert correct spelling here> anyway... when I see that, I, at least, double check my spelling and more often than not I click on the highlighted correct spelling and get the correct SERPs.

 

If you search for mobil home G does not mention a spelling error it just brings up mobile home sites My main competator does not show up on the list. He must have done a better job spell checking his pages In the last month, about 7% of the people searching on that term use the misspelling.

 

Looks like google has been looking into statistical illiteracy.

 

I'm quite sure that googlebot -- which, despite the complexity of its algorithm, is only a dumb machine -- doesn't recognize the correctness or otherwise of your site's grammar. However, many of your visitors are certainly going to do so.
And if you don't know the difference between, for instance, its and it's or all together and altogether, the professionalism that (it's to be hoped) you're trying to project is going to be questioned. Regrettably, sloppy language is on the rise and fewer people take as much care about using it correctly as used to be the case. But one of the signs that you'll take proper care of your visitors is the attention to detail that's evident in your content. This includes an absence of misspellings and incorrect usage.

Duncan

 

Right on, Duncan... I always enjoy reading your posts.

Getting visitors to your website is obviously important and it's what most people tlak about in forums such as this one, but it's at most half the battle. We've all landed on poorly designed and presented, spammy-looking with functionally illiterate content -- what do you do? More than likely move on to the next site in the list where you can feel some confidence in the competency and professionalism of the person offering the product or service.

This is one of the bonuses of a decent WYSIWYG editor -- Notepad doesn't come with a spellchecker and at the very least you should run your site through one of these before publishing it. Better still - ask someone else to proofread it, not only for spelling but for the way it reads.

 

I think that you can indirectly affect your Google rank by being more professional. Putting out quality content that is spell-checked and error free will make users link to you more. And hopefully that will count in Google.

 

no they search keywords google not the way its written

 

inverse, what the hell are you talking about? This is at the fourth post I've read from you in a few minutes that either makes no sense or is simply pointless.

 

Well minstrel, just a few dozens to go...

 

I believe, however, that it is important not to have too much complication on your site. By this I mean that some simplicity is good, however, you must still have an air of professionalism for your traffic to turn into revenue. There must be a balance.

 

The google bot simply looks at keywords and links. Nothing to do with site design in any way.

 

Tops30 has the best explanation.

 

i doubt they care too much