One of my early posts to the SoloSEO blog was How to Get Your Web 2.0 Brand Past the “Did you Mean” in Search, and I discussed how in Google if you searched for our brand name “soloseo” Google would come back and say “Did you mean: colosseo”. Well, it’s time to celebrate around here…we have overcome! No longer will Google give a suggestion, but now it knows that when people search for “soloseo” they mean it!
What contributes to that? It’s very hard to tell, and I don’t have case studies beyond our own, so it’s all just a guess. I think the main factor is the two main focuses of SEO, content and links. We establish our brand through both content and links, producing content from our site, and obtaining links to our site (many of which have soloseo as the anchor text of the link). Since November 2006 when we first launched SoloSEO, we have gained thousands of links and have created hundreds of pages of content.
My blog post mentioned above gave another example, this one with Alexa.com. Alexa also has a “did you mean” when searching for our domain name. Unfortunately, things haven’t changed there. If you type in soloseo.com it says: “Did you mean: solosexo com?”. How crazy is that?
What experiences have you had with getting past the “Did you mean” in search engines?