Hotbuckles.com has a page dedicated to all the ways in which “belt buckles” could be misspelled-
Does this strategy work?
Rishi Rawat
When I started in 2008 my core thesis was that most purchase behaviors were rational. 9+ years on and 300+ experiments…
Comments 3
This strategy do not work any more. It was ‘interesting’ 3-10 years ago but now google by default shows top results that are ‘did you mean’ to prevent spammers hitting any serious traffic
It works, but it isn’t a home run strategy.
Indeed it’s true that Google asks “if you mean” and offers the correct spelling.
But underneath that, they still show results.
If your site is actually about the subject, then having a page with common misspellings can help with incremental traffic.
I don’t know if I’d try to throw them all up on a single page like that though.
There are a lot of products or services out there with multiple legitimate ways of spelling.
For example, beltbuckles and belt buckles. I’m sure this company knows which form is most commonly searched, and uses that form most often on their site.
We often add alternative legitimate spellings throughout a product description. It looks terrible if you see it through the eyes of a copyeditor who wants clean, consistent copy.
But it makes the cash register ring to use the same exact words that your customers are typing in to Google. (Which doesn’t necessarily mean misspellings.)
Author
@Zoran and @Lars: You make good points. Based on compete.com numbers it seems hotbuckles.com is fairly popular (link: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/hotbuckles.com/) and since “Common Misspellings” is a prominent homepage link I suspect this strategy must be working for them. That said, their mechanical approach to listing all permutations and combinations of the phrase “belt buckles” seems extreme.