I’m not quite illiterate, but I can not spell. What’s worse is the words that I can spell I often mistype.
Fortunately, this handicap has drawn thousands of surfers with a similar disibility to my sites over the years. Granted, mesothelioma won’t show up in most 3rd grade spelling contests, but spelling it mesothiloma here twice helped me rank 3rd in Google for the term.
In the adult space, I will intentionally misspell Porn Star names 3 and 4 different way. You’d be amazed how easy it is to rank #1 for misspellings that get 2-7k searches per month. Proper names are great to misspell for search traffic: Jennifer Anderson, Kristy Alley, Osama-Bin-Ladin . . . etc.
Typo spam is considered “High Class Spam” even by the search engines. This is the one type of spam I am comfortable recommending to people running white hat sites. I doubt the search engines penalize much if any for typo spam - even colleges and universities engage in it.
If you are writing your own content, one method is to type your work in notepad or textpad (I love textpad) and publish both the spell-checked and unchecked versions. My rule of thumb is: if I can misspell it, so can someone else. If you’re not sure about how to spell something, spell it every way that you think might be right, and publish them all. Then create a site map that links up the misspelled versions.
Common mispronunciations like Birfday, Nucular, Liberry, and Samwidge are also great sources for typo spam. If someone pronounces a word incorrectly, odds are they will spell it wrong when searching for it.
I know the search engines have the “Did you mean ________” feature, but it doesn’t always kick in (especially for proper names). Moreover, people don’t always click it. And while you probably don’t want to litter the main page of your site with misspellings (like I just did), having a sitemap that points to pages for the “Orthographically Challenged” is as necessary and proper for a business as having a handicapped accessible restroom.
So, if you don’t have misspellings on your site with a sitemap, the question is:
Why do you hate handicapped people?
6 Responses to “How to Typo Spam”
After reading this article, I’ve had some fun coding the Typo Trap 
The Typo Trap : Misspelling Generator
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i should break these up into separate pages and use “did you mean?” typos
I love typos but I get kicked out of Google all the time for them. I write good articles, 350 words or so each lightly targeting a misspelling and I get banned quickly. MSN still loves me and so does Yahoo.
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“handicapped accessible restroom” - nice comparison!