If I search for mcarthy baits, google assumes I want mccarthy baits, and I have to click back to get the results I was originally looking for.

I have a customer thats just a little upset that google are trying to direct traffic away from people on their site. Is it just the sheer number of references to mccarthy that drives google to do annoying things like that?

Incidentally the site is chock full of references to ise and colour

I read a recent (excellent) follow-up on this and similar pieces from others around the time which you can find here: http://www.hudghton.co.uk/why_google_just_cant_suggest.html

In his post Jon finds that the rather poor implementation of the search suggest tool, seems to inform this increased volume in alternative spellings be they Americanised, or just plain wrong.

Regardless of what Google are doing, I think it is fair to say we won’t get a huge amount of say in it. Whilst that sucks, there are still a number of things that you can do, to help your site rank for “casters” without changing your user-facing content.

You can add “casters” to your page meta-titles and in H tags, as well as for specific products in your base feed (if you have one). You could also look to approach your link building strategy with this “Americanised” spelling in mind, and deliberately use the “casters” spelling in anchor text.

I’ve a website which sell castors or ‘castErs’. Hits on the site appears to dropping due to the Americanised spelling issues. Without changing all reference of ‘Castors’ to ‘Casters’ on the site which will annoy UK visitor, I unsure what to do.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Google – but what are they doing?

I came across your post this morning via Malcolm’s blog and had bookmarked it already. You beat me to it!

I’m going to add some comments and questions over there now as you’ve given me a refreshing perspective.

Particularly interesting is the stationary/stationery example as the search volumes switched over.
Having regular reviews of the SERPs for these terms, alongside their search volumes and notable tweaks to the Google algorithm could definitely give us more insight into whether (not weather) they’re really focusing on ‘improving’ results with these popular spelling alternatives.

Aside from auto-correct, I’d also be interested to know how the decision is made on ‘did you mean’ suggestions and whether this then relates to search volume, leading to possible auto correction.
e.g. Humour has no “did you mean” suggestion and shows only results for Humour however “Humourous” does have a “did you mean: humorous” suggestion with the top two results from that SERP being shown.

Thanks Malcolm. I read your post with interest. This adds even more perspective to this move. Although they have reverted the default position with “ise” and “ize” spellings, it still remains that there seems to have been some “idiot tuning” to the algorithm.

Which frankly; sucks.