Is Google Greg the Grammarian?

by Randy Hanskat

In these days of trolls not only lurking under bridges but lurking around every corner of the internet, it’s popular to abuse someone who points out poor grammar and spelling on a website, blog, or social media post.

Cries of “Grammar Nazi” ring from the Comments Section.

It was sad when people didn’t care that a President mixed up “there” and “their,” along with myriad other stupidities in his Twitter ranting. It’s sad when people don’t care that the sign at the grocery, “Avocado’s 2 for 1,” is messed up. It’s annoying when a text hits your phone asking, “Your going to the party, right?”

We’re in a time when the speed of communication often runs over grammar and spelling in its haste. That’s unfortunate because most grammar is intended to help the reader understand the writing. A comma, for instance, has the power of a sledgehammer. Two commas can mean everything to a detective and a perpetrator:

· Suzy claimed Frank committed the murder.

· Suzy, claimed Frank, committed the murder.

Now, that’s power for two marks that barely take a full space in typography.

For this blog, let’s address if the content on your company website, complete with its typos, poor grammar, and spelling mistakes affects your ranking. It’s common knowledge that Google and Bing value content now over the random stuffing of keywords onto pages. But does the quality of that content affect your ranking?

It’s not in the algorithms

A few years ago, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller was asked in a video hangout if spelling and grammar were ranking factors.

His response? “Not really.” He later expanded on his answer, “I don’t know if any of our algorithms specifically look for the grammar and say this website uses English in a bad way and will demote it. I don’t know. It is possible but it feels really kind of niche.” He then pointed to the difficulty considering the differences in language and the nuances of some aspects of grammar and the like.

OK, so the algorithms aren’t punishing your site for those wacky constructions, random capitalizations, and typos. Does that mean you’re getting away with your wayward grammar, spelling, and proofreading? Maybe not.

Users want correct usage

It turns out most people prefer quality in the online writing they’re reading. In a survey taken a few years ago with 1,000 social media users in Britain, bad grammar was their number one complaint about a business’s social media communications, with nearly half of the respondents citing it as their biggest irritation. The survey placed bad grammar as more annoying to users than overly strong sales messages, tweeting too often, not tweeting often enough, and various other online communication issues. This problem users have with bad grammar has been cited in numerous other studies.

Matt Cutts, Google’s search engine expert, has said that spelling and grammar are not “direct signals” to Google, but that they do influence a website’s ranking. He said “spelling, stylistic elements, and factual accuracy” is one of 23 elements used in the algorithm to determine website quality.

Bing has noted on its Bing Blog that its algorithms also penalize content that contains bad English, both in terms of grammar and typos. The logic is that sites with few “errors” just seem as though they’re of higher quality, and as a result deserve to be bumped higher in search rankings.

When you think about it, this goes to the core of search. A search should provide the searcher the highest quality content matching his or her request. A clean site is far higher quality, and easier to digest, than one filled with grammatical mistakes and misspellings.

The bottom line? You need to concentrate on the readability and accuracy of the copy on your site, in your promotional email messages, and other online areas.

There are two ways to do that. You can have your office manager give it a shot just to get it done. Or you can hire a professional who delivers high-quality content. You will pay more for that, just as you do for a good mechanic, but in both cases it will benefit you.

I’m that guy when it comes to the mechanics of good writing. Let’s talk.