Are Grammar and Spelling A Google Ranking Factor?

Proper spelling and grammar have become the norm in many of our workplaces.

But, no matter how high your Grammarly score is, do search engines care?

The truth is that there are a plethora of articles available that explain how grammar and spelling affect SEO.

We’ll look at the evidence today.

The Claims: Grammar & Spelling As A Ranking Factor

This claim has made headlines in a number of SEO publications and blogs, which is unsurprising.

Indeed, several sites with poor spelling and grammar saw significant ranking demotions around the time Google released the first Panda Update.

Coincidence? Or is it just a conspiracy theory?

It’s not just SEO professionals who believe spelling and grammar are important.

According to a 2016 study published by Harvard Business Review, 81 percent of businesspeople believe that poorly written material is a waste of time.

And anything that is harmful to users is usually harmful to search engines as well. Right?

It’s easy to see how this could help you improve your readability for SEO purposes.

The Evidence For Using Spelling & Grammar As A Ranking Factor

Is there a ranking factor for spelling and grammar?

We need to go back to August 18, 2011, to answer this question.

In a Google Webmaster Help video, Matt Cutts (then-Head of Google’s Webspam Team) answered this question directly.

In a nutshell, yes and no, depending on the search engine.

According to Google, spelling and grammar are not factors in how your website is ranked.

And, in 2017, John Mueller of Google confirmed that claim again.

More recently, in 2021, John Mueller confirmed that poor spelling and grammar does impact quality.

He states:

“With regard to spelling errors, grammatical errors, I think that’s something that’s a bit more of almost like a gray zone in that on the one hand we have to be able to recognize what a page is about.
And if we can’t recognize that because there’s so many errors on the page in the text, then that makes it harder.
The other aspect is also that we try to find really high quality content on the web and sometimes it can appear that a page is lower quality content because it has a lot of …kind of… grammatical and technical mistakes in the text.”

In a 2014 Bing Webmaster Blog post, Duane Forrester, then-Senior Product Manager at Bing, wrote that poor spelling and grammar would hurt your rankings on Bing.

Forrester stated:

“This might all seem a bit ‘down in the weeds’, but just as you’re judging others’ writing, so the engines judge yours. If you struggle to get past typos, why would an engine show a page of content with errors higher in the rankings when other pages of error free content exist to serve the searcher? Like it or not, we’re judged by the quality of the results we show. So we are constantly watching the quality of the content we see.”

In reality, spelling and grammar have an impact on the user experience as a whole. It’s best to be safe and run a spellcheck on your content before releasing it.

Should You Be Concerned With Spelling & Grammar When It Comes To SEO?

In the Google Webmaster Help video above, Cutts adds that higher-quality pages are more trustworthy and have better spelling and grammar.

While spelling and grammar aren’t directly ranking factors, they do affect your SEO.

It’s a matter of trust.

Users will lose trust in a business or law firm with poor grammar and spelling.

They will bounce if they lose trust.

When a user visits your site but immediately leaves or spends less time on your content than is typical, search engines receive a signal, which may result in lower rankings and traffic.

According to a Website Planet study, typos on landing pages increased bounce rate by 85 percent and reduced time on site by 8% when compared to the clean version.

What About Poor Spelling and Grammar in Blog Comments?

Cutts stated that reviews, user-generated content, and comments have no bearing on your rankings.

However, if these comments are spammy in nature, they may have a negative impact on your rankings.

If you’re getting spam comments, you should either use a CAPTCHA plugin to improve security or disable comments entirely.

Our Opinion On Spelling & Grammar As A Ranking Signal

Based on the evidence, it appears that spelling and grammar can have an impact on your rankings – possibly directly, but most certainly indirectly.

According to Google, spelling, and grammar have a direct impact on on-site quality, which has an impact on how your site ranks.

That is to say, you should not overlook the importance of proper spelling and grammar.

Read your copy before you publish your next piece of content.

Then read it aloud again.

To clean up grammar issues, use Grammarly (aim for a score of 90+).

And there are apps like the Hemingway app that can help you make sure your content is easy to read (aim for a grade of 6-8, unless your target audience dictates otherwise).

Although spelling and grammar are not a direct ranking signal, they do have an impact on the user’s experience.