From both brand building and SEO perspectives, if you had the choice between the following 2 options for a domain, which one would you choose: - keyword1-keyword2.com (hyphen + .com) - keyword1keyword2.net (no hyphen + .net) What do you think?
I've heard that non-hyphenated domains position higher in SEs, but I would like to see some scientific case study about this.
Precisely. I would too like to see some proof of how my domain www.visitors-online.com could possibly be better as visitorsonline.com, because without the hyphen, there are keywords in that which are irrelevant (as I mentioned before; it could be seen as visitor son line)... I believe in this instance, a hyphen can be beneficial for SERPs / SEO
I have few theories, but i'm no expert on this. I believe that google might run iterative dictionary check on your domain name and index all possible variations, or it could extract the site's topic and some keywords, and then do relevant keyword seperation in your domain name. Try googling "kids exchange". First site is kidsexchange.com. Now, this could surely be interpreted in a wrong way.
Isn't there some google penalty for having multiple domains (seen as multiple sites) pointing towards the same content source?
Oh... i understand now. Sorry. I was reading something about having multiple domains pointing towards the same site, and google's penalties. But if you just do a 301 redirect, there is no penalty.
I recently bought some domains and I heavily researched this; this was the general consensus of the so called online experts. From a strictly SEO point of view the hyphen is slightly better: Manufacturing-Jobs.com will do better than ManufacturingJobs.com; however from a Branding point of view the no hyphens option is better: if your site is Manufacturing-Jobs.com and someone types in ManufacturingJobs.com then they will go to the site of someone else. However if SEO is important to you then you can have the best of both worlds by buying both domains and using the hyphen version for the actual site but then having the non-hyphen version point to the hyphen version; i.e. ManufacturingJobs.com points to Manufacturing-Jobs.com. This is my first post in this forum; please be kind.
Higher positioning of hyphenated domains seems to be very logical, but most of the domains i encounter on SE's first pages are non-hyphenated. But i believe that this is more due to psychological factors than SEO (people are more inclined to non-hyphenated domains). But i believe that this >to hyphenate or not to hyphenate< dilemma is overestimated and it certainly doesn't have any major effect on search engine rankings. Correct me if i'm wrong. Like we have mentioned above, it would be good if someone could do a controlled 'scientific' research about this (if it's possible, due to various factors involved). That article would surely get a lot of high-PR dofollow backlinks and exposition.