I did a bit of thinking about this whole spelling fiasco, and decided that I’d write a post in response rather than writing out all 700+ words here. In short, however, I think you and I have slightly different views in this instance. Always good for an informative discussion nonetheless. You can find it here: http://seo.site-reference.com/optimising-optimization-google-spells-seos-crazy/

While I comprehend the notion of adapting to generalized user behavior, I can not condone nor encourage it. Doing so has clearly caused a serious precedent in that Google is now behaving like a George Bush preemptive military strike scenario. I look forward to reading your article come Monday.

I suppose you could argue that the relevancy of results for a search term like this is unlikely to be affected by whether US or UK spelling is used for colour.

On the other hand, Google, get your Sherman T20 spelling tanks off our English lawns.

Although I bemoaned the inability to search for stationary in the UK any more – because G now shows you results for stationery without a by-your-leave – I can sort of see why they do it. No one in practice really wants to search for stationary, so I presume they observed lots of people searching for stationery after stationary (or a high % clicking “did you mean stationery”) and decided to just show the stationery results.

So my guess is that they are using user behaviour to return results for a different but similar keyword when lots of people’s behaviour shows that that’s what they meant all along.

We can’t search for stationary any more – but the much larger volume of people searching who meant to search for stationery get better results.
None of which explains optimise / optimize.

I’ve got some more examples of Google changing how they deal with spellings in a different context – but you’ll have to swing by my blog monday morning to see them!

And while you may be one of the “newest” SEO Chicks, you’re still tops in my book :-)

Although they have retracted the enforced spellifization, an industry colleague of mine has furthered research on this whole issue. Malcolm Coles has found that there is still persistent “idiot tuning” of our results in the UK for ‘soundalike’ terms that have different meanings e.g. Stationery (as in office supplies) or stationary (as in, “oh crap, my car won’t start.”)
http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/googles-spelling-problems-are-worse-than-we-thought/

So we’ve not seen the last of this.

One final point. At the risk of seeming pedantic, I should point out I’m one of the newest SEO Chicks; which was founded by Lisa Myers and Julie Joyce. Whilst the post was AMOW, I can’t take any credit for the blog in its entirety.

Monitoring will need to continue to see what’s up with that. And there’s no way of knowing if it was the uproar in the U.K. that got the attention of Google’s crack-heads, or if they realized themselves how foolish it was in the first place. Or, alternately, if senior management reads Search Engine Journal and my article caused massive firings within the organization.