I just carried out a search for the term "newyork hotel" on Google and was quite irritated with the results that Google brought up.

Not even one of the sites on the 1st page (first 10 results) had the word "newyork" in the body text. The #1 listing had the word "newyork" on the body, but in a single email address. The rest of them didnt even have that much.

I'm sure i'm not the 1st person to bring up such an issue and i surely won't be the last. But i do wonder what justifications they offer for such blatant slip-ups of their algorithm?

PS: I can manually pull up at least 100 sites that use the word "newyork" in their visible body text, which in my opinion would have been more satisfactory results.

:mad:

Why do you care?

If you're looking for a hotel in new york that looks like a reasonable set of results to me, why do you care if they have the words in their body text or not?

Why do you care?

If you're looking for a hotel in new york that looks like a reasonable set of results to me, why do you care if they have the words in their body text or not?

Ummm.....maybe his sites that have "Newyork Hotel" everywhere aren't showing?

;)

Why do you care?
If you're looking for a hotel in new york that looks like a reasonable set of results to me, why do you care if they have the words in their body text or not?

I care for 2 main reasons:

1. When I am searching for something, I want Google to tell me about exactly that.... not make up its mind about what I should be looking for. They always put up the option to search for the correctly spelt keywords, and if that is what i want, i will click on that link. Fair enough, right?

2. A lot of my clients are start-ups and small companies that dont have the funds to pay through their noses to compete with the big players who rank top 10 for competitive keywords. They therefore resign themselves to try and win clicks from visitors who might mis-spell keywords and not get picked up by the Travelocity and Hotels.com's of the world. They loose business in this case.

From my own point of view, this is not the first time Google has coughed up results that cannot justify being obvious matches for the keywords i was looking for. I can understand how this may happen in say 2 or 3 out of 10 results, but it starts getting a bit much if you have to trawl through 30 results before you find a page which even mentions the word you searched for!

Well to me the query gives what people want...

Absolutely.

So, what your saying is "I cant get my clients sites to rank and im not happy about it"

Well, hard luck from your point of view but Google arent really worried about your clients, and neither am I as a searcher. I'm worried about gettting some relevant resuts, and those are relevant results.

When I am searching for something, I want Google to tell me about exactly that.... not make up its mind about what I should be looking for. Google can't tell you what you want to find. It will simply provide results that, according to it's own processes and limitations, may help a searcher find what they're looking for.



A lot of my clients are start-ups and small companies that dont have the funds to pay through their noses to compete with the big players who rank top 10 for competitive keywords.
Then don't aim for the most competitive keywords - there remain plenty of exploitable niches. Mispellings isn't even the beginning of it - use your imagination and research niches you can exploit for your clients.

Those ranking sites are 100% relevant to me,

Also It is "new york" not newyork, I feel that is how it is pronounced, Even the spell check feature automatically suggests that, I feel the spell check correction feature automatically corrects the keyword and gives results for new york,

See these results http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=new+york+hotel they look identical to the newyork hotel search and those results are relevant for me,

Ok bad example... i shoulda known everyone would get uppity with the "newyork" example. But here's some another that caused me grief recently:

"Search engine optimisation" - 3/10 results use the word optimiSation
I want websites that spell it optimisation cos we are an English company, and obviously firms that spell optimisation with a Z are american or cater to an american audience.

There's many other incidents along the same vein I can think of.

I also almost always have the same type of problem when trying to trace actor/actress filmographies, but those I can assume are cheifly due to spam much more than issues with Google.

Yeah, that p*sses me off as well - BUT - truth is G is bright enough to know they mean the same thing, so in long run this is good for G's searchers.

Again, people searching for the seo phrase get relevant results.

Every other seo company in the UK has had to cope with it too. :)

Again, people searching for the seo phrase get relevant results.

Actually this was a problem I encountered back when I worked for another company and we were searching for SEO firms. We used the Yahoo! local directories to locate an agency because none of us had the patience to work through the Google results trying to figure out which companies would actually be able to provide proper English spellings :)

Those SERPs look perfectly normal to me, they are all on the topic the search is for. Is isn't as simplistic as onpage keyword density any more to tell what pages are about.

obviously firms that spell optimisation with a Z are american or cater to an american audience

Obviously?

yeah do a search for : las vegas loan officer

Not one loan officer from las vegas is in the top 10. Not even a directory of loan officers in las vegas is in the top 10.

Just a bunch of JOB sites. Lots of marketing and adwords revenue for google there on the top and right.

Google is too big to offer relevant results with free text searches now. 8 billion pages and counting. Monster.

Obviously?

The British, and most of their colonies spell optimisation with an S. The US is the only english-speaking country I know which spells it optimization. Hence the conclusion. :)

I'd be very interested to learn of any places / countries other than the USA where optimisation is spelt with a Z.

Optimization is the correct way to spell Optimization.

Nobody spells Optimise ... Optimize is the correct way.

Optimization is the correct way to spell Optimization.

Nobody spells Optimise ... Optimize is the correct way.

This is why we are a super power.

Septic tanks......legends in their own minds :)

It's optmize to the uncouth and optimise for the couth :p

I just carried out a search for the term "newyork hotel" on Google and was quite irritated with the results that Google brought up.

Not even one of the sites on the 1st page (first 10 results) had the word "newyork" in the body text. The #1 listing had the word "newyork" on the body, but in a single email address. The rest of them didnt even have that much
:mad:

hello AccuraCast,
With out looking at the sites you mentioned (so i am guessing here) if the top site has 10,000 other sites pointing at it with the words "newyork hotels here"
then google would find that site pretty relevant...even if the words are not on the page...this is called anchor text and i am surprised that none of the usual high quality posters here could be bothered to mention it to you,
for which i appologise (should that be with a 'Z')

Regards..and good luck with your searches on google for 'anchor text'

G-E-M
S.London,UK

If you need SEO then you can PM me ;)

Optimization is the correct way to spell Optimization.
Nobody spells Optimise ... Optimize is the correct way

I, and probably most of the rest of the english speaking world (including Google UK) beg to differ...

https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/tips.html

Other useful words in a dictionary you may want to look up include ethnocentric, parochial, provincial, xenophobic and insular.

Ian McAnerin
Search Engine Optimiser and proud of it.

The theme of this thread so far appears to be: spelling variations and Googles listings related to them, which is far more interesting than picking on spelling or complaining about competitors, I think.

Maybe we should talk about that - it seems more useful.

There are a few different ways off the top of my head to handle regional spellings (and misspellings).

If the spelling is correct but different (ie optimise/optimize, car rental/car hire, etc), then you can dedicate different pages of your website to the different spellings. It usually looks bad to have two different versions on the same page unless you are very careful, ie:

Are you looking for a car rental (car hire to our UK friends) near Pittsburg? Well, you have found the right place to be! Yadda, yadda, yadda....

Otherwise you would have a page optimised for car rentals and another for car hire, and in the above paragraph link the two phrases in question to the appropriate pages.

Another issue is that locals will often spell local locations differently from people in other countries. ( http://www.cbc.ca/news/indepth/words/kiev-or-kyiv.html ) An example would be Kiev and Kyiv, or even Québec and Quebec (which brings up the language issue - http://www.translationdirectory.com/article100.htm .

Another way can be to use the misspellings (or alternate spellings) in the metatags, but that doesn't work with Google.

Yet another option is to get a bunch of incoming links with the misspelling (or alternate spelling) in the link text.

Ian

Thank you for pointing that out GEM. Your response explains one of the possible causes of the problem... a cause i must admit i failed to think of. However, it does not change the fact that the results still do end up appearing a wee bit wrong, considering that the word i searched for does not show up at all on the page itself.

Other useful words in a dictionary you may want to look up include ethnocentric, parochial, provincial, xenophobic and insular.

LOL @ Mcanerin :D

Anchor text from another site would hold quite a bit more weight the on page text. Also, the number of anchor text links are infinite, while on page text is far from.

Check out "Google Bombs" and "Anchor Text" in your favourite SE, which I assume is not Google ;)

AccuraCast spend a bit of time reading the posts and also the articles at Search Engine Watch. It will give you a deeper feel for how each of the engines rate their keywords - or at least some of the elements and the debates about how much each factor in according to various opinions.

Congrats AussieWebmaster..... u just posted your 1000th post here!

The logic behind anchor text weightage and importance of other factors than the body text is well publicised and I have a pretty good understanding of it too.

However, what surprises me, and at times irritates me is how much importance some of the other factors are given, so that results at times are not as "user friendly" as Google claims them to be.

What i'm getting out of this thread, though, is mostly that you win some and you lose some - Google tries to please the masses, and succeeds more often than not. Issues such as the ones I mentioned are more of an exception rather than being the norm.

I, and probably most of the rest of the english speaking world (including Google UK) beg to differ...

https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/tips.html

Other useful words in a dictionary you may want to look up include ethnocentric, parochial, provincial, xenophobic and insular.

Ian McAnerin
Search Engine Optimiser and proud of it.


You spell Optimization the way you want. Go to Inventory.overture.com:

84154 search engine optimization
9283 search engine optimisation

You spell Optimization the way you like. I will spell it the correct way.

Even Microsoft Word, Microsoft Works Processor and Word Perfect always has a spelling error on optimisation.

I wont post on this subject again. Say whatever you want Ian McAnerin.


---

lol...I had to edit my post. I see all UK and Australian people have the tendency of misspelling Optimization. I did the following searches on Google:

Optimization (20,000,000 results)
Opimisation (6,430,000 results)

Most of listings for optimisation contain UK, Australia, .co.uk, .au.

I am glad I am not from down unda.

You spell Optimization the way you want. Go to Inventory.overture.com:
84154 search engine optimization
9283 search engine optimisation

I did the following searches on Google:
Optimization (20,000,000 results)
Opimisation (6,430,000 results)

Now you got to Overture.com and select a country such as the UK and run the same test:

Search engine optimisation: 17,025
search engine optimization: 5,707

And on Google UK (UK sites only):
Optimisation: 1,600,000
Optimization: 805,000

Now last of all, pick up your favourite dictionary and look up the meaning of xenophobic, provincial and insular, and you might understand why everyone else who knows how to speak english is laughing right now!

You spell Optimization the way you like. I will spell it the correct way.

Would you also like an A+ grade or 3-stars for "correct" spelling?
ROFL!!!

I am glad I am not from down unda.

And i'm sure "down unda" is just as glad you aren't!

Even Microsoft Word, Microsoft Works Processor and Word Perfect always has a spelling error on optimisation.

Hahahahahah! This has got to be the icing on the cake.... the funniest thing i've read on the SEW forums..... LMFAO!

If you actually changed your regional settings from USA to England, Australia or any other country that speaks english, the spell checker won't highlight optimisation as an error, but would do so for optimization.

This works the same way that "debile" would show up as a spelling mistake in english (US or UK) but would be synonymous to "roboranking" if you looked it up in the French thesaurus. :p

Sorry ed.... i just couldn't resist the personal dig in this case!

Google tries to return relevant results to searchers, not cater to the exploitation of webmasters and SEO's looking to cash in on mis or alternate spellings. Nice when it works, but can't really complain when it doesn't.

So, are you saying when you searched Google.co.uk there were no results that actually spelled optimisation the UK way? That is pretty sad.

Can't we just have a good discussion without flames, America-bashing, and pettiness? Only in geekdom can you get a bunch of guys having testosterone flare-ups over spelling semantics. :eek:

Not all of the problem with the Optimize vs Optimise searches are the search engines fault, the searchers have to bear a bit of the fault too.

As an American living in a country that spells it the British way I have this problem all the time.

But if you are looking for SEO and you think that the only people in the world that can spell it more than one way live in the UK, then IMO you should not be searching the worldwide Google pages you should be searching the Google UK pages where all of the top ten results for search engine optimisation are UK firms and all but one of them spell the word with an S.

Interesting that there is one serious UK SEO firm that spells it with a Zed in their page title and 3 more who offer the Zed version as an alternative.

How and where you search makes a difference. When you search Google.co.uk there are two search options below the search bar, one for searching all the web and one for searching pages from the UK. If you want pages from the UK that is the place to search.

You say tomato I say tomatoe let's call the whole thing off.....

Well, going back on topic, as long as a page can achieve top google results only due to anchor text, I would say their algorithm is pretty simple! (That's why I adhere to the opinion that inktomi has a better algorithm and more relevent results - see this article http://www.v7n.com/inktomi-vs-google.php)

Maybe, but Inktomi is about to expire when MSN start using their own database and I always rank better on Yahoo and MSN.