Does Bad Spelling and Grammar Affect Your Google PageRank?

If your roofing website (or individual web pages) currently have a low PageRank with Google, it may be possible that this could (in part) be a result of poor spelling and grammar.

Matt Cutts, who works for Google's Search Quality group (specializing in search engine optimization issues) recently made the correlation between low PageRank and poor spelling in a Google Webmaster Help video.

In responding to a question about whether spelling and grammar matter when Google evaluates site quality, Cutts said “We noticed a while ago that, if you look at the PageRank of a page — how reputable we think a particular page or site is — the ability to spell correlates relatively well with that. So, the reputable sites tend to spell better and the sites that are lower PageRank, or very low PageRank, tend not to spell as well.”

Cutts says that spelling and grammar aren’t currently used as a “direct signal” for search ranking, but that “I think it would be fair” to use them in that way.

Google has been very clear that overall site quality and usability is part of what Panda is looking at. The question “Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?” is even one of 23 questions that webmasters should ask themselves in relation to the Panda changes. Similar questions include “How much quality control is done on content?” and “Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?”

Mr. Cutts also mentions in the video that Google has studied ways to determine the reading level of content on the web, and that this type of analysis “would be pretty interesting to explore as a potential quality signal.” Interestingly, Google added a reading level filter to its advanced search results.

The bottom line is that there is no proof that poor spelling or grammar directly affects your PageRank, but it is definitely something to ensure is not an issue just in case.

If you have any questions about this blog post, or would like an independent roofing website evaluation performed, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.