As you know white-hat SEO is all about delivering quality to the visitor. Giving him so much that he’s going to share your site in awe. But we also know, especially with recent 2.5 Panda update taking place a week ago, that Google is putting much more stress on quality of a site itself. Whether it’s well designed, provides interesting, engaging content really matters. Matt Cutts from Google takes on this question in an interesting video, drawing a correlation between spelling and PageRank…
So, Matt declined that it’s among signals Google is currently actively using, BUT… Amit Singhal, Head of Google Search, gave a hint about what’s being considered when Google is rolling out Panda updates:
- “Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?”
You can read the full post HERE. So, for a minute, let’s consider – why in the world Google would not use it as a signal? Other than that some problems Matt was suggesting it could pose.
Crawler perspective
Ask yourself a question:
What does Google want to deliver in search?
The answer is: exactly what the user is looking for. So Google engineers have to ask themselves – what are the elements that make people judge whether the page content is trustworthy? Design? Credentials? And… spelling? Grammar? Think about it – you wouldn’t trust a text which is badly written, would you? So why should a crawler make results which contain these errors rank high?
Here’s a piece of a very good comic from The Oatmeal:
User perspective – white-hat SEO
And since white-hat SEO focuses on impressing the reader and make him keen on sharing your links, think about a terribly detrimental effect bad spelling can have on your link-building campaigns. You, already, wouldn’t trust a source which has spelling errors, but even more certain is that you wouldn’t share it. You wouldn’t link to it. So keeping an eye on your language is a vital aspect of SEO, and overlooked can cost you a lot of time – and money.
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SEO Tools to use:
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