On December 8, 2011 at 09:50, Ernie Gilman said...
...and there was a movement in the US in the late 1800s to simplify spellings. Color and Labor, etc. caught on, while actually changing the spelling of through to thru, etc, did not catch on.
Being serious for a moment, though, yes, sure, it's spelled* "theatre" in UK-centric countries, and it really is found both ways in the US. What is not found is the way it was used in that web site: one time theater, another time theatre, both on the same page. I know he wants a search to be successful, but I've heard of that being accomplished by putting key words like on the background of the page in the background color, that is, being invisible to the eye but visible to google. And let's not forget webcrawler. Or is that webcraughler?
In the early days of Google, you could do it that way but now if you hide text as you have described, Googlebot considers it spam and you are very likely to be penalized or even delisted for this methodology.
Unfortunately, proper writing and site optimization can sometimes conflict. If it is a contest of traffic vs. proper English...I'll take the traffic anyday :)
