The following is generic text containing the nonsense keyword "altwrittén". At the date of creation of this page (June 4, 2005) the word does not result in ANY search results for Google, MSN, Teoma or Yahoo.
We are testing to see if I can get the alternate spellings for this term: "altwritten" and "altwriten" indexed, and under what circumstances.
You can link to THIS page, but please do NOT link to any of the sub-pages, as it may alter the results due to anchor text.
One problem with keyword misspellings is that you can't often spell a word wrong on the page, yet the misspelling is more popular. This is a series of tests intended to check how each search engine handles this and to offer clues as to the best way to handle it as an SEO.
Google has recently changed how often it will "stem" the words (ie return results for "montreal" as well when searching for "montréal")
The word "altwrittén" was chosen because it allows me to test the two most common spelling issues on the internet: 1) spelling of non-English words using the English alphabet/keyboard, and 2) actually misspellings.
Here in Canada, where the proper name for Montreal is Montréal, for example.
However, look at this WordTracker report:
| Keyword | Count | Predict |
| montreal | 1293 | 1107 |
| montréal | 35 | 30 |
Obviously, an SEO would want to focus on the version with the most people searching for it, but this is misspelled! Optimization for the Hispanic market is also an issue with the common usage of the letter "ñ". Once I have finished collecting data for this test, I'll replace the "é" with an "ñ" and repeat the test (the word was chosen because it had both opportunities in it)..
The content for this keyword misspelling test has been taken randomly from spam sent to my inbox. I figure I might as well make it useful for something, and this is the equivalent of burning junk mail in my fireplace :) I've placed enough random content on each page to be approximately 500 words, and the content is different on each page, avoiding duplication filters.
Page 1: This Page. Contains all three words in body text, title and keyword metatag, and I will link to it using the misspellings, as well. It should show up for all three versions.
Page 2: The proper word is used in the content and title, but with no mention of misspellings anywhere, and is not linked with misspellings. This is the control page. It should not show up for any misspellings unless the search engine stems or makes a decision to include a misspelling for it's own reasons.
Page 3: The keyword misspellings are used in image "alt" tags only (unlinked)
Page 4: The keyword misspellings are used in image "alt" tags only (linked)
Page 5: The keyword misspellings are used in the keywords metatag only
Page 6: The keyword misspellings are used in <noscript> only
Page 7: The keyword misspellings are used within <object> only
Page 8 altwritten altwriten : The keyword misspellings are used in incoming anchor text only (no on-page use)
Page 9: The keyword misspellings are used in the title only
Page 10: The page path (i.e. domain name/directory test) contains the misspellings, but the content does not.
Page 11: The misspellings are hidden using CSS within the body.
Page 12: The misspellings are within comments only.
Page 13: The misspellings are only within a Dublin Core tag intended for the purpose.
Page 14: The misspellings are within a bookmark link on the same page, but not otherwise on the page.
Cloaking is not tested because the page that is being delivered via IP or user-agent detection is what the search engine would see and index, and would therefore match one of the above pages. From the search engine viewpoint, there would be no difference.
Other methods that deliver one page to a search engine and another to humans are also not tested for the same reason. We are only testing the page that is delivered to a search engine.
It's important to note that several techniques used here hide content from visitors in non-recommended ways - they may be considered to be spam by a search engine even if it's only used for misspellings.
All pages will have at least one link to them (from this page) and will also be submitted to each of the 4 major search engines. There are no restrictions in the robots.txt files and all pages will validate to W3C HTML 4.01 Loose standards. The declared language for the pages is US English and the Character Set encoding is UTF-8. Declared content type is: "text/html".
Unless otherwise noted, all articles written by Ian McAnerin, BASc, LLB. Copyright © 2005 All Rights Reserved. Permission must be specifically granted in writing for use or reprinting anywhere but on this site, but we do allow it and don't charge for it, other than a backlink. Contact Us for more information.