Google tries very hard to show some good results and will even show you results for a different query/keyword if it thinks you’ve made a typographical error. If Google thinks you have made a typo, Google will show you “the correct” one with a SERP that says “Showing results for” and will also give you the option of searching for the word as you specifically typed it into search.
We have seen this in test situations where we end up with fake keywords that aren’t completely unique and trigger the “showing results for” type searches. We realized that this type of SERP could potentially affect rank trackers in the real world.
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This is my favorite test in a long time. We tried to create fake keywords. That is what we are doing here because we want an environment that we can control. That is a big part of this concept. Every once in a while, you get a keyword that isn’t clean. So it is a fake keyword and it doesn’t exist and all of a sudden, Google is – did you mean this and they do the showing results for.
An example is, in the screenshot. This is the keyword switcheroo – my keyword is what I typed, Google switcheroos it to another and they show you results for that. What we realized when we were doing these tests were, they kind of messes up things if you are doing this with a rank tracker. We can’t get accurate results for these things. I was – hold up, how is this actually happening in the real world? What if this was a brand?
We did some deeper dive and so we did a fake keyword and it had the switcheroo and you can see that ProRankTracker which is a very good tool, it has the same page ranking for both but it isn’t. That is just the keyword switcheroo page – is that they are showing. We realized that it is really problematic.
It doesn’t happen a lot in the real world but let’s say you have a brand and it is a hipster cool brand that decided to misspell their word, if you are tracking things through a regular rank tracker, you might actually be a victim of the keyword switcheroo and you might not be getting accurate results for that actual term that you really want to follow.
The other thing that we realized, a very clever way to do SEO sometimes, is to optimize for that misspelled word. That is a good tactic where you could make a lot of money from where there is a complex word to spell and they are often misspelled. You want to rank track for that misspelled word and there is a chance that the rank tracker gets stuck with the keyword switcheroo and those are the results that they are going to show and they are not going to show accurately.
It is not a huge problem but we realized that it was enough of a problem to report.