yesterday i deliberately misspelled one word "mortgage"..i used "morgage") to get a better ranking and today every page on my site is no where in the search engines, virtually no traffic now and some of my pages have been removed. could it just be a coincidence that this happened right after doing that?
I don't this thats the reason. In one of my blog post I misspelled "restaurant" and now I have rank two for that silly misspelled word combined with one more word. when you said non of ur pages are there did you mean that they are de-indexed or they don't come in search for some specific keywords??
If you misspell words on your site it makes your site look amateur and decreases trust. If you want to target misspellings use the words in the anchor text of external links. That way you get the ranking and still look like a pro.
Normally for most of the competitive keywords it is always better to compete for misspell keywords as this one of the ways to drive traffic to your site and it is recomended that target separate page for misspell keyword rather clubbing that with the competitive keyword.
I'm not a fan of deliberate misspellings. You may get the click but how does it make you look in terms of conversions?
Where did you put the misspelling? If you put it in the keywords meta tag, it could cost you. Google want to see that the words in you keyword list are actually on the page too.
Mispellings are OK, as long as they are not too obvious on page. In other words, put them in a title on an interior page somewhere. Remember, people mispell when they search.
I very much doubt a misspelled word will have such bearing on your SERPS. I think it is apure coincidence. You have to remember Google has been in a flux for a few month with things beginning to settle.