: Google shows "search instead for" when searching for our website Our website is new and the name is similar (only one letter different than another website) completely different type and company

@Radia820

Google returns what it believes is the most relevant search results and this includes words that are often incorrectly spelt. From personal experience I can tell you it'll take some time to get Google to return foo instead of boo.

In order to get Google to return foo instead of boo you need to prove to Google that foo is foo and not anything else. Many factors are involved when establishing a keyword on Google and these are what you can do:


Improve site authority.
Gain organic back-links. (Anchor text foo) will help but key thing here is I said organic so don't go creating your own or if you do don't just use foo as the anchor text, Google uses link profiling on each site which involves link diversity (Platform Type/Follow Type/Link Type/Niche) and so on.. Which is very complex and often people who make there own links will fail.
If a local or international business registering foo with many local citations sites will improve relevancy on the term foo.
Time, there is no quick fix for this and its just something Google will kick in after you've shown that foo is not boo, patience is key here and of course the more people you have talking about your site the faster this process is... If your site doesn't offer anything new, or is a small local business it'll take some time but its still possible. If a local business foo may become foo quicker than say a international search since Google has set results for local and not local.


The other believed factor is when someone clicks show results for foo instead of boo this informs Google that foo is foo and will help towards gaining foo as the most revelant search.

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@Eichhorn148

There is generally no way to contact Google about these types of issues. This will get corrected automatically as your site becomes more popular.

This happened to me as well. When I built some software and launched a site, Google initially thought that the name I had chosen was a mis-spelling of something else. By this point, Google has gone the opposite way and my site even gets sitelinks. For me, it took nearly a year for Google to remove the "search instead for", but I didn't do much to try and speed up the process. My site is also not very popular and even today, most of its Pagerank comes from my main site.

I suspect that the biggest signal that would indicate to Google that their "showing results for" is not appropriate, would be that people use the "search instead for" link. I would ask friends and family to occasionally search for your site, click on "search instead for", and click through to your site (not more than once a week).

At the same time, work on building a quality site and promoting it.

We have a very popular post about encouraging sitelinks that might give you more ideas about what to work on.

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