Low Pagerank and Misspellings

When Panda first launched earlier this year I noticed that some client-pages with good content were getting nailed.  I didn’t notice until I started reading the content that there were lots of typos and misspellings.  I thought “Eureka! I have discovered an elusive Panda ranking signal!”  And I had.   I fixed the problems and the pages popped back up in rankings.  I’ve been spellchecking like crazy ever since.  It makes sense, right?  An algorithm update focused on content quality should have a signal that says content with misspellings is low-quality.  I’ve been quietly plugging away fixing spelling errors and watching the pages increase in ranking.  I haven’t seen much chatter about it anywhere on the SEO forums which is why I didn’t want to say anything.  A Panda ranking signal that nobody is talking about – you can see why I kept quiet.  Well thanks to Mr. Cutts the cat is out of the bag.  Check out the Google Webmaster Help video recently released.  Matt says in the video that spelling on it’s own isn’t one of the signals they use for ranking a site – I doubt it.  Since it does impact pagerank, and pagerank impacts ranking, spelling absolutely does impact rankings… and my clients will agree.