Ranking For Misspelling of Primary Keyword

[Belize]

I have been baffled for the past few months for ranking for the misspelling of our primary keyword BELIZE in the Google U.S. Serps.

We are nowhere to be found, but are ranking for the misspelling BELIZ (without the final "e").

We have been online since 1995 on page one everywhere. 11 months ago we did a site redesign changing over to WP as a CMS.

We changed all pages from widget-example.html to widget-example and properly 301ed all pages after deleting the old pages.

Then we accidentally de-indexed the site for a month due to a robots.txt error. This has been corrected 4 months now.

We shared this on the Google Webmaster forums and some kind folks helped with advice - nothing major in our opinion but we implemented most of the tips given.

We are doing fine everywhere with all search engines and Google itself in other areas Google.ca Google.bz Google.mx for example.

But in our primary market is the U.S. where the majority of our readers are - tourists and retirees looking for our information - we do not exist.

The joke is that searching for BELIZ in the U.S. Google Serps has us on Page One. It is a joke that is NOT funny - or maybe some human evaluator made a mistake or is playing a sick joke?

We have done a reconsideration request in case there was a manual penalty and we received the no manual penalty form letter.

I notice increasingly in Google Live Analytics people typing in our full domain name - I guess out of frustration not getting the site when inputting the primary keyword.

I find that I can write a new article and in a couple of weeks it ranks in the top couple pages. Many other pages are found via long-tail only.

I find it intriguing that yesterday I wrote a very small article, a press release actually, and today searching for the misspelling BELIZ in the U.S. Google Serp the root domain is ranked #2 and the snippet and image displayed is from this little article which is nothing really great.

I am new here. Thanks to anyone who can help.

The site:

Belize

http://www.belize.com

[NakulGoyal]

I see that you have variant anchor text links, which is good. I see an opportunity to try and give your links some internal juice. Can you get Belize and related keywords linked internally to respective pages ?

Other then that, I would continue to build content and links. I see you are ranking #2 for the misspelling, but nowhere for the correct spelling. It's not any kind of error, but the competition. You have the perfect domain. I think all you have to do is keep on building it.

The reason why your rankings could have dropped is the competition from what I have seen so far and the fact that Google has been trying to take reduce the effect of Exact Match Domains. In this case, you just need "strength" to be ranking #1.

How do you rank for other keywords/long tail etc ?

[matbennett]

Ranking for the misspelling could be a red herring.  They are by their nature far less competitive terms, so a site that can't rank for more competitive terms may do well on misspellings. Likewise for the long tail terms.

However, what you are saying does make me wonder a bit about penguin penalties.  Do you know when you dropped out of the SERPs for your main term?  Check back through analytics and see if you can pin it down to a week. I'd imagine it would be pretty obvious when it happened.

[RebekahMay]

I looked at your backlink profile in OSE.  You have the anchor text "belize" linked from a large amount of domains and with a very high amount of links.  The domains linking with just the anchor text "Belize" take up nearly 23% of your link profile from linking domains.  The amount of links coming to your site with the single keyword "belize" take up about 35% of your total incoming links.   This is just for "Belize" and not the other various you have such as "Belize online" etc.

This is my person post-panda opinion, but I think this is likely to raise red flags with Google.  It may look "over-optimized".  I don't think submitting a site reconsideration requests would help - in fact, I fear it will only hurt as now Google will be reviewing all this information manually.

Second:

Your primary keyword is "belize" which is highly competitive.  You may want to focus on something like "Belize Vacations" or "Belize Travel"

I just want to verify:

Have you ever ranked for the single term "belize" in the US?

Are you experiencing a decline in visits from other keywords which have historically performed well?

[Belize]

We have been on Page One on Google US from inception since 1995.

We notice on GWT about 2,000 backlinks from a defunct link directory. This goes up and down depending on the weather. Right now it has fallen to about 600. Here is a sample link:

http://caribbeanlinks.com/opensearch?query=Belize Cruise&hitsPerSite=4&lang=&hitsPerPage=20

We never asked to be linked there and have written several times but no response.

@NAKULGOYAL - we do well on long tail for example:

retirement in belize

living in belize

belize offshore banking

getting married in belize

belize maya

top ten things to do in belize

and many others

@mattbennet

I see your point but I do not believe we could be NOWHERE to be found for our main keyword - as stated above we have been on page one for our main keyword since 1995.

[matbennett]

I'll ask again : When did it drop?

When ranking changes occur is important information in determining the cause.  Although google updates continually big changes tend to get noticed and documented. If your ranking changes coincide with a known update (my guess is still one of the penguin updates) this will tell you what Google consider to be wrong and therefore how to fix it.

[Belize]

Hi Mat

Being trying the GA and this is giving me a headache but looking at a tutorial on the web I am looking for Panda and/or Penguin and entered the dates given and will try to attach it here.

Bz 1 April - 15 May 2012