People misspell their search engine queries all the time. That is why it can be incredibly helpful when Google steps and offers “did you mean suggestions.”
Google actually offers a few different spell-check features in its search results. These come with the internal codenames: “Did you mean,” “Chameleon” (mid-page suggestions), and “Spellmeleon,” where a couple results are shown for the corrected query.
Chameleon:
Spellmeleon:
“Did you mean” comes up fairly often, and a problem that some businesses might face as a result of this is that Google doesn’t understand that their name is a valid query, and offers a “Did you mean?” alternative. In this Web 2.0 world, where seemingly every start-up is some weird non-existent word, it’s not hard to envision this happening fairly often.
One business owner actually sent a question about this into Google’s Matt Cutts, who answered it in the following video uploaded to Google’s Webmaster Central YouTube channel. The question presented to Matt was:
When I do a Google Search for my business name, Google suggests “Did you mean:” with some other company name. Is there anything we can do to keep that from happening?
Cutts says that there’s nothing that he knows of that a business can do about this at this point. “The hope is that over time, we learn that sort of thing automatically,” he says.
“Anything you can do to build the reputation of your business, so it’s more well-known, so that you’ve got a lot of links pointing to you, and you’re more easily found on the web…” Cutts suggests as a possible solution.
These are the kinds of things that signal Google to realize that it is a valid query, and that it’s not something that they need to show a spelling suggestion for. So in theory, if you promote your business well enough, the “did you mean?” will not be an issue.
There aren’t any special forms or anything you can fill out to notify Google at this point. So if this is a problem for you, you have a little work to do.
