Should SEO Trump Good Grammar?
March 15th, 2012
Here’s one that crossed my desk recently that … well, it just makes my teeth grind. In order to protect the innocent, I’ll present an analogy to the actual situation.
Let’s start with the following sentence: “A well-known writer was seeking a part-time job.”
The company with the website on which that sentence appears many times wants to score high in search results for “well-known writer” and “part-time job.”
The company pays a hefty fee to a major SEO firm to provide recommendations about how to improve its search engine results.
The SEO firm realizes that the public isn’t using the hyphens: They’re typing “well known writer” and “part time job” into the search engines.
The SEO firm recommends removing the hyphens from the website copy.
The company removes the hyphens. The copy on their site now reads: “A well known writer was seeking a part time job.” Not once, but many, many times.
This is wrong.
I don’t care what the SEO impact might be, it’s wrong.
In that sentence, “well-known” and “part-time” are compound adjectives. As such, modifying the words “writer” and “job” respectively, they are to be hyphenated.
That’s it. No debate. That’s the way the language works, and to make a conscious and thoughtful decision to present incorrect grammar is an insult to any literate person (though, to be fair, those ranks are thinning all the time).
“Business” is one of the most commonly misspelled words in the English language, but you’ll never find the New York Times changing the name of their online section to “Busness” or “Buisness” or whatever in order to boost more traffic to their site.
At least I hope not.
I get the desire for higher search engine results. Believe me, I really do.
But this is just not okay.
Takeaway for marketers: Standards, people, standards! Using improper grammar in order to gain a bit of SEO advantage is flat-out wrong as wrong can be. End of story.
MARCH 17 UPDATE: It turns out that pressing this issue caused a deeper dive into the data which revealed that Google results for keywords with the hyphen are 99 percent the same as without the hyphen. So while in the past the hyphen was needed to facilitate an exact match, Google has evidently gotten smarter with their algorithm, so the hyphen isn’t necessary in this sort of case. Chalk one up for good grammar.