One of the other SEO firms on a popular SEO chat forum wanted to know why his competitor was ranking well for a misspelled term - “conectors” as opposed to “connectors” - when the term did not show up anywhere on his competitors’ page, including the meta tags. It was driving the poor guy crazy because that particular misspelling happens to get a lot of searches, and there are over 98,000 resulting sites for that search on Google. Many of these sites were directly targeting the misspelling in their body content, meta tags and page title, yet his competitor was ranked #2 on Google without even targeting the term once on their page.

His question: “Can anyone enlighten me as to how you can come up number one without ever using the word anywhere within a page?” The search engine optimizer signed off - “Yours, Rather Puzzled“.

I thought this would make a good post because it IS possible - easy, even, if the term isn’t very competitive - to show up high without actually using the term on your website. The key? A powerful mixture of “Anchor Text” and “Semantic Indexing”.

Anchor text is the text used inside the hyperlink. Often it is “click here”. This is anchor text. Semantic indexing is a bit more complicated. Below is a copy of my reply to Mr. Puzzled:

From what I see on Google, the #1, #3 and #4 positions have the misspelling in the title. If you’re talking about the paid results, that could have to do with the other site bidding much higher than you. But let’s take #2 ( erni.com ) for the sake of argument, which ranks well for the term but doesn’t actually use it anywhere in the copy. I assume this is the competitor you are talking about.  Try this search on www.search.yahoo.com: ( linkdomain:erni.com conectors ) WITHOUT parentheses, of course. Notice that the connector.tincling.com site uses conectors instead of connectors in their body content AND they link to erni.com. That could be due to semantic indexing by Google’s algorithm. The sites that link to you are important enough for you to inherit some of their synonyms. For instance, if twenty sites about a very specific topic - yellow one-sided widgets, for example - all linked to your website, even without using that term in the anchor text, your site might rank well for the phrase “yellow one-sided widgets” without having ever used it in the content. That’s one way…

Another way is if someone out there is actually linking to erni.com with the anchor text spelled wrong. As you can see from searching for failure and clicking on the #1 listing, Google uses the text people put in links to your website to help determine what that page is about. And, of course, the Whitehouse bio of George W. Bush is about a failure. But that’s another story…

And yet another version of this anchor text explanation could be that erni.com is linking to that page using the misspelling from somewhere else in their website.

I hope this helps.
Regards,
Everett Sizemore
Director of Internet Marketing
First Page Fitness
www.firstpagefitness.com