Earlier this week, an inadvertent change to Google’s search results kicked up a storm of online discussion and criticism. Online commentators such as Search Engine Journal’s Alan Bleiweiss were “floored. Stunned. Confused” when searches made on the Google UK portal insisted that the American spelling for SEO was correct.
For a brief period, the default results for a query for “search engine optimisation” spelled “search engine optimization”, as per the American spelling.
This caused a furore among vocal members of Google users in the UK. Nichola Stott of SEOChicks found that the problem wasn’t limited to “search engine optimization” but was widespread among other words where ‘s’ and ‘z’ are interchangeable depending on the norms of the locality. Malcolm Coles, an SEO blogger who has taken special interest into Google’s optimisation for UK spelling, highlighted several more such as “coloring” or “colouring”. The first seven entries in the top 10 results for the query “colouring” are all in the American spelling, and the bottom 3 are in the original, UK spelling.
One of the biggest reasons that commentators from the SEO community were irate with Google over the change was because of the importance of spelling in both SEO and PPC marketing. Optimising and bidding for specific keywords is undermined when native spelling is commonly disregarded by the search engine’s automatic features. Even if the desired spelling appears in organic results, giving precedence to alternative spellings of the keyword creates unnecessary competition over terms.
However, rather than an attempt to impose the US spelling on the sceptred isle, the change appears to have been the result of automatic processes within google – a bug in the language algorithm. Speaking to Media Post, a spokesperson said: “We recently introduced a change to the spell correction feature on the google.co.uk domain. “This change introduced a bug where we were suggesting American English spelling refinements. We have temporarily rolled back the change to fix the problem.
Whilst this statement isn’t likely to appease those who criticise the company for lax testing of changes to the UK search portal, it’s good news for any SEO company or PPC agency operating in the UK. If Google had deliberately changed the language then huge amounts of revenue driving into AdWords or organic SEO could have been wasted.
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