what do you guys think of hyphenated domains that are products or words eg pooltable.com change to pool-table.com, do they have any value.
Most of the good domains name are not available anymore (specially in .com tld). Do you have a choice? No..!! I bought a few domains with - and its working alright. Your site's link structure, content should be good and you will be alright.
I think they are ok domain names. As long as it is only 2 words and one hyphen. They can be helpful in getting higher SE's rankings if your DN keywords match the content on your site.
Makedifference: you are right i am not about to pay 40k for a name, what do you mean by link structure. Do you mean linking to the site in the same niche? Greengambler: I can see this happening in a content site but what about ecommerce sites where, your repeat customer would more likely look for name without hyphen. And what about if the site has terms like store or mart after hyphen.
If they are decent like the above example, definately it's got value, but obviously the hyphen dramatically devalues the name
Why does a hyphen devalue a domain name? Are you talking about the overall worth, the easability to remember? I thought it didn't effect SERPs? In fact - is recognized as a space so if your keyword is pool tables and the domain is pool-tables it should help... Is there something wrong with keyword-keyword-keyword.com if you don't care if anyone remembers the domain?
it depends on how you intend to drive traffic to your site hyphenated names are a poor choice for audible-word-of-mouth recommendations as well as a poor choice for sites that expect repeat type-in traffic simply because these users will often forget the needed hyphen and get your competitor but if you intend to drive most of your traffic via ppc ads at google or yahoo then a hyphenated domain can just as good or better - especially if it's the type of site that you don't expect frequent returning visitors, after all new-york-apartments is easier to read than newyorkapartments
Thanks for confirming what I was thinking. I was getting scared because all of my content sites that are pure SE traffic have two hyphens
They can be good if you develop them..don't expect to buy pool-tables.com and sell it for some mass amount of money. Search engines don't care about hyphens so if you're going to develop it and everything you'd be fine..A while back I sold free-poker-forum.com for $175 alone with no site..but that was because it was previously developed, had a PR, backlinks, and traffic..
I think that hyphenated domains are great if u cannot find .coms and they have a higher CTR on the PPC campaigns. Don't expect type in traffic.
Where'd you get that? Google treats a hyphen as a space so it can recognize the keywords being used. There's no problem with hyphens and SEO but people prefer domains without hyphens as visitors may forget to type in the hyphen.
I've gotta agree and disagree with this. Bad for SEO - Search engines do place some value on the occurrence of keywords in the URL. However, if your targetted keyphrase is over 3 words, it's generally accepted that a hyphenated domain is devalued (Google, for example, doesn't like more than two hyphens per domain - hypens after the / are fine though). - Also, like mentioned prior to this reply, they're not ideal for type-in or word-of-mouth traffic. Good for SEO - Search engines place value on keyword occurence in the domain and extended URL. Stick to a maximum of 3 keywords in your domain and you're golden. - Some people argue that hyphenated domains look spammy in the SERPs, an opinion which holds some weight. However, usability studies on the major SERPs have indicated that the vast majority of users make their click-decision based on a result's Title. Get your keyword as near to the front of the Title as you can (should be easy with a keyword-rich domain), add in a call to action and you're set! - When you're looking to build up quality links, you want the occurrence of your keywords in there somewhere. A keyword rich domain means that a direct link to your domain will always pass keyword relevance, unless alternative anchor text is used. - These domains are also very useful in directory submissions, especially for the big boys who insist on using your domain/company name as the Title in their directory. I personally pick up hyphenated, keyword-rich domains all the time, and whilst it's generally acceptable that non-hyphenated is preferable there is a lot of value to them, whether you're looking to develop them yourself or sit on them while you find a domain buyer.
Thank you guys it is a great information. From your feedback what i can understand is that for an ecommerce site which will have both type-in and SE traffic, a good strategy would be to have a domain keywordkeyword.com for type-in and keyword-keyword.com for SEO and PPC campaign, Any feedback would be appreciated. Also would you guys take keywordkeyword.net or keyword-keyword.com, judging from your response i think i know the answer but would like to see your thoughts.
That would depend on the focus of your business. If you're users/customers are tech-savy or regular Internet users, then a .net domain may be the one to go for. If not, I'd stick to .com - it's the most familiar TLD and thus gives a degree of authority/credibility to your site. By all means drop more details in a PM and I'd be happy to discuss it further.
What i can understand is that for SEO purpose it works almost as good as domain without hyphen, as long as the keywords are related to the content. As far as the dollar value is concern, it does devalue a domain.
Hi, Was going to post a new thread for opinions on hyphenated domains but found this one. Lot's of perspectives on this thread which is good. Here's mine... Personally I'm tired of hearing how hyphenated domains are not any good. It is a common practice and search engines know that. I have the advantage of having programming experience and it is much more efficient and takes less computing resources to look for a keyword by parsing a domain by looking for a hyphen. Yes with technology today you can do almost anything but I would challenge you to write two programs. One that looks for keywords by parsing a domain by hyphens and and then write another one that looks for keyword without a delimiter as is with the case of non-hyphenated domains. Now which was easier? Furthermore, which one left you with your sanity? If you plan on advertising your domain on the radio, TV, or some other offline marketing method then you should use a non-hyphenated version. However, if you're planning on using offline marketing technniques then ideally you would probably want to own both the hyphenated and non-hyphenated version anyway. You would probably also want to consider getting multiple TLDs for your name in this case. If you're planning on marking online then hyphenated will work just fine. I've had a number of hyphenated domains professionally appraised. Although they are less valuable then non-hyphenated, Most of them have been appraised at $xxx. One was a double hyphenated 21 character domain that was appraised at $200 by domainsystems.com (Moniker). My hyphenated domains are exact keyword domains. As far as search engines are concerned they're just as good. Additionally, hyphenated domain are often easier to read on paper/computer. How long has mankind been writing. How many languages do you know that concatenate words into one giant sentence. Of course they don't. We use spaces, periods, comma, etc I could probably write a short book on this topic but I'll stop there.