SlideShowPro News

06.04.07 | To slideshow, or not to slideshow

As ridiculous as it sounds, for the past couple of years I've struggled with a seemingly benign, yet annoying as all hell editorial conundrum. That is, is it "slideshow" or "slide show"?

Fact: "slideshow" is not a word. It's a modern concatenation of two real words that should always be written with a space between them.

It may not sound like a big deal, but consider how often these words are written throughout this web site, our help documentation, in our application UIs, etc., etc. It's everywhere. And in nearly every instance, I've used the proper spelling.

But what does Google have to say? Type "slide show" into Google, and right off the bat you get "Did you mean: 'slideshow'." No, actually I didn't, but Google thinks I made a mistake. Not a good sign.

How about search results? If you search for "slide show" (without quotes) you receive 132 million results. Sounds great, but those include any mention of "slide" or "show" -- not necessarily the two words together. Refine it to the exact phrase (by wrapping it in quotes) and you get about 28 million. That's a big drop. Okay, but what about "slideshow"? 82 million. In other words, people are nearly 3 times more likely to type the concatenated, incorrect spelling into Google.

So who's right? If I were to ask an English professor or newspaper editor, I'm sure they'd side with me and go with "slide show." But from an SEO perspective, it only makes sense to write your copy to match up with what the majority of potential customers are using.

Incidentally, at the time of this writing, this site comes up as the #5 natural search result when searching for "slide show" in Google, and #8 for "slideshow." Not bad. But could we do better by standardizing on "slideshow"? Almost definitely.

It still bugs me, but hey -- we're working our butts off to grow a business here, and the last thing I'd want is to handicap our growth in any way over a spelling quibble. So I'll bite my tongue and resist the urge to click the space bar from now on.

Mob rule!