If your webpages aren’t listing well in Google you might want to check your spelling and grammar.
A while ago Matt Cutts, the Google SEO guru, revealed that they found a link between the quality of a website and the quality of spelling. When they looked at the PageRank of webpages, i.e. how reputable they think the page is, they found that it tied in with the quality of the author’s spelling. Pages and websites with a higher reputation within Google tended to have better spelling.
At the time Matt said that it wasn’t yet a factor in determining search engine rankings but also that it would be fair to use this information in the future. If you have a look through the video (shown below) he discusses the issues of how to determine the quality of spelling.
He also mentions that Google had been looking at the reading level of webpages, i.e. how difficult the information is to understand, sometimes expressed as an age level. If you have a look at the advanced search options on the Google search page you’ll see that that actually included this as a way of filtering your results. At the moment they’ve split writing into beginner, intermediate and advanced levels.
Google’s Desire for Better Quality
All of this ties in nicely with Google’s updates over the past few years. These focused on trying to remove low quality, duplicate content, spam filled pages and websites from the search results. In fact they already hinted at this in a previous Webmaster help article which asked you to consider a number of questions when writing your webpages.
“Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?”.
“How much quality control is done on the content?”.
“Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?”.
These very much point to the overall quality of writing in your webpages as well as the actual quality of information being a factor in how well they rank your webpages.
My Advice
Have a good look through your existing webpages and make sure that everything is up to scratch. Don’t forget that the easiest way to run a spellchecker through your webpage content is to copy the text and paste it into word processor. This should then highlight the spelling mistakes so you can update the content.
