Is Spelling & Grammar The Most Important Google Ranking Factors?
Should you be worried while preparing SEO rich content for your Blog/Vlog ? Does Google pay any attention towards spelling and grammatical errors ? Read on to learn more :
While most professionals aim to write the top quality content possible, spelling and grammatical erros happen.
But what materializes when you publish those mistakes? Will Google be less likely to rank you higher in search results due to those mistakes?
The Claim: Do Spelling and Grammar Affect SEO ?
Understandably, many SEO professionals see spelling and grammar as possible ranking factors. In the course of time, one of the things often repeated by Google is to avoid releasing low-quality content.
In an article on how to create high-quality websites, the Google Search Central Blog specifies focusing on quality of the content. The introduction on MOM(Multi Unified Model) introduced by Google, is a technology for complex search queries rolled out in May 2021) makes it essential to display your topic expertise and understanding in factual and helpful content.
Google’s SEO Starter Guide advises that you avoid “writing clumsy text with numerous spelling and grammatical mistakes.” In short, Google’s algorithm knows very well how to handle misspellings.
The Evidence : Spelling & Grammar As Ranking Factors
Head of Google’s webspam team, Matt Cutts, was asked if spelling and grammar counts when evaluating content and website quality. What he said was “spelling and grammar were not direct ranking signals.” After running various tests Google has found that sites with improved spelling and grammer are more reputable. Finally, he suggested that content should give a good user experience regardless of the consequences on search rankings.
On whether website owners should edit blog comments or disapprove badly-written comments to protect the site’s quality he said “There are ridiculous comments on sites like YouTube, but that doesn’t block YouTube from ranking the videos properly. The key is to ensure that your content is high quality.”
What we understand from this is bad spelling and grammer doesn’t affect search engines or rankings directly, but it does make an impact on your users, which is more important.
Google’s search advocate, John Mueller was asked whether Google’s search algorithms audit for broken HTML, spelling, or grammatical mistakes ?For which he says spelling and grammar a gray area. It affects search rankings because if crawlers can’t understand what the webpage is about, it can’t be indexed properly.
Verdict : Spelling And Grammar May Not Be Directly Important For Google Ranking, But They Are Still Very Essential
Spelling and grammar are not straightforward Google ranking factors. However:
- They are essential signals to users of your site about its quality, and you should be worried more about that than whether the algorithm measures them.
- Google is not the only search engine in the whole world, and they might act as ranking factors for other search engines as well.
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