How do Misspelled Keywords Affect SEO?

Discover the effect of how misspelled keywords affect SEO and how Google’s algorithm is relating to these misspelled for indexing and ranking.

Algorithms are constantly getting updated to give searchers the best user experience. Is using misspelled keywords still a valid strategy for SEO? Find out here.

How misspelled keywords affect SEO?

Targeting misspelled keywords used to be a common strategy in search engine optimization. Is this still a valid strategy in your opinion? Or is it super outdated? Is there any reason to target misspellings today, or would it be a waste of time? Could it hurt SEO in anyway?

In the pre-Google days of SEO, search was simple.

The algorithms weren’t super-advanced and were basically just a fancy way of saying “give me all the documents that contain this exact phrase and order them by how many times it appears.”

The search engines even gave us a meta keywords tag so we could tell them what keywords the page was relevant for.

As you can imagine, we SEO professionals abused the hell out of that.

No matter what a website was about, it wasn’t uncommon to see “Britney Spears” show up in their meta keywords tag.

Seriously it was such a big volume (and heavily spammed) search term that it’s literally one of the examples Google uses when they talk about misspellings and understanding them today (more on that in a minute.)

Because of all that abuse by SEO pros, and because of huge advancements in the fields of information retrieval and NLP, no reputable search engine uses meta keywords anymore.

Similarly, search engines have gotten better at understanding what words mean.

Here’s an example from a Google talk a few years ago where they talk about how they try to understand misspellings and what word the user really meant.

You guessed it, the examples are Britney Spears.

Read more here.