We recently took on the task of ranking RageHats.com for their new product, Merica Hats. Google has one of the most accurate spell check algorithms in the world. Using data from latent semantic indexing, nearby letters, and a comprehensive study of the english language they’ve developed a phenomenal algorithm. In their webmaster guidelines, they promote the use of good grammer on your website. But what happens when you create a product or brand that uses slang in the product name?
Side Note: Quite a few people have been asking us where to buy ‘Merica hats from — You can actually visit the official Merica hats website to purchase your own ‘Merica hat.
Merica Hats – Is It Slang if Its Used Frequently?
RageHats has developed a hugely powerful brand presence. Their products are frequently promoted at music festivals, rave events, college parties, and through social media. Their newest product, the Merica hat, plays off of the term “America”. Before the release of this product, typing the word “merica” into Google resulted in the appearance of “Did You Mean?”. However, after some viral promotion, the search term no longer resulted in spell check appearing.
Google checks search volume data to determine if something is a typo. Let me explain…
If 1000 people per month search the misspelled term “Ameriac” and 100000 people per month search for “America”, then the spell check algorithm will confidently be able to determine that Ameriac is a typo. In order to get your product or brand name off of the spell check algorithm, it needs a substantial search volume. RageHats was able to virally promote their Merica Hats until enough people searched for them that Google decided it was no longer a typo.
The Impact of Misspelled Keywords
Before Google got extremely good at spell checking, it was sometimes effective to focus your SEO efforts around common misspellings. Often times, common typos of high volume keywords still yielded enough traffic for conversions.
For this reason, Google faced many challenges in developing their technique to correct typos. Overtime, they had four major updates to their spell checking methods. The most recent update corrected many of the ongoing problems, effectively eliminating the need to optimize for typos.
- “Did You Mean”
- “Chameleon”
- “Spellmeleon”
- February 3rd Update
February 3rd Algorithm Update
On February 3rd, Google rolled out a number of quality updates, the biggest one was focused on penalizing sites with bad grammer. In the case of the Merica Hats, this was not a case of carelessness or typos, it was intentional. For this reason, we advised Rage Hats to focus heavily on social media FIRST so when it was time to SEO that page, Google would understand that it was not a typo.
How we Won
Perform a search for Merica Hats. You’ll see that the spell check algorithm no longer appears. Instead, Google knows that you meant to perform that search. Our client, RageHats.com, sits in the second position for images and 4th position overall.
