Dashes in the Domain Name

http://www.webcopywriter.com.au/2008/09/seo-dump-the-dash-in-your-domain-name/

This article says dashes are bad for seo.

Agree or disagree?

Can you provide examples?

 

I highly disagree, I know plenty of awesome websites with dashes in their domain name for example: http://www.webmaster-talk.com.

 

But if your wanting your site to rank for certain keyphrases like "web copywriter" (a keyphrase which probably has so so competition) then the dashes hurt the rankings.

For example, I recently looked at a site with a dash with an exact match for a keyphrase. It is one year old. However, the competion for the keyphrase is quite weak. But this site doesn't even rank on the first few pages. To top it off, this site has around 200 backlinks.

In australia, competition for "web copywriter" is weak. Australian competition for "web copywriter sydney" is VERY weak. So that explains a lot. But the dashed domain couldn't even rank for "web copywriter"

But I was tempted to use dashes (maybe even 3) because I had a long keyphrase. If you put it all together then it doesn't look good. The URL doesn't look good without dashes.

But if your just wanting to create a brandable site then 1 dash doesn't matter. But you might lose some traffic to those typing in "webmastertalk.com for example.

 

I've seen hyphens rank equally as well as regular names. However, I do not choose to use them because they are 100% unmarketable.

Customer: What's your domain?
You: Digital-Point.com?
Customer: Oh DigitalPoint.com?
You: No, D-I-G-I-T-A-L-HYPHEN-P-O-I-N-T.com

Hyphen domains are 100% unmarketable. So unmarketable that they can't even be used on radio advertisements.

Hyphen names limit your opportunity.

 

They're terribly inconvenient for readers though... if they forget to bookmark/subscribe.

 

From an exact phrase SEO point of view, dashed domains are bad.

But as you say, dashed domains are also bad from marketable point of view. But myself, i'm only interested in one time visitors. I have adsense sites.

 

Exactly. They can work in SE's but depending on your marketing plan can be a pain virally speaking.

 

I disagree, word of mouth marketing is different aspect but when it comes to seo it should be seen from different perspective and i have done experiments to get results by dashed domains, yeah you cant just make dashed domain and say why its not coming if first result of google without doing any efforts...

 

absolutely no harm in dashes I know plenty of sites who rank high and top placements with dashes. Nothing hurts a site other than breaking googles best practices.

 

Well, I have had both domains (two different niches, exact keyword with and without hyphen) that I eventually got to high rankings and from my personal experience..

There is a difference: The exact match without hyphens do 50% better.

The ones without a hyphen seemed to shoot up in rankings a lot quicker with minimal effort, as for the hyphen actually takes some elbow grease. Now don't get me wrong, exact match with or without will rank well, so if you put the same amount of SEO weight behind two different domains, one exact match with hyphens and one random domain name; the exact match with hyphens will almost always win out. That's why you see so many with hyphens rank high. But you normally wouldn't see one with hyphens outrank one without hyphens if they were two different sites going for the same keyword.

My theory on this is that Google adds a slight more weight on ones without because of the spamming sites involved with ones having hyphens like buy-some-viagra.com or some crap.

Hope that helped.
James F.

 

Hyphens are not user friendly if you are promoting your site directly to public in "word of mouth" sense. But, on the other hand, hyphens means nothing to search engines or SEO, Hyphens are SEO friendly as well as Search Engine friendly.

 

Yeah this is something that should be considered. I used to have a domain with a hyphen and not only was it a pain to say out loud, but nobody would remember the exact URL because they were unsure where the hyphen went.

 

i dont think that dashes is not good ..dashes in url doesnt matter but before dashes and after dashes you should use keywords instead of single world

 

For search engine it is not at all bothering that how much did you use hypen. The thing to consider is dynamism. The URL should be static url which helps crawler to fetch site content and URL.

 

Dashes in a domain doesn't affect its rankings really. But if you want to not include them, then consider using alternative words in your domain, which are available.

 

Dear posters, if you write "dashes are bad for seo" please, write examples and experiments that you had (as JamesCF did - big thanks to him!). Otherwise, it sounds like voice of newbies.

in my opinion and due to my experience - dashes do no harm at all. Googlebot could find relevant words or phases anyway.

 

OK, I agree that they are inconvenient but they aren't bad for SEO at all.

 

It is worse for SEO because it is an irrelevant character.

CheapDrugs.com is much better than Cheap-Drugs.com. The - adds an irrelevant character thus detracting from the exact match value.

However, Cheap-Drugs.com would be more efficient for ranking for "Cheap Drugs" than "DISCOUNTMEDS.com".

The hyphen sucks just remember that it isn't marketable in the real world (and when Google realizes this - you'll be out of luck!)

 

Hmmmmm thanks for changing my mind for Dashes. I agree with you now.

 

I disagree because I saw a lot of big websites which are using dashes in urls. So Its doesn't matter.