hyphens in domain names ?

Hey all,

Been wondering about this of late, some of my sites with "HYPHENS" in them are not doing so good any more and i thought i would ask some of the experienced people here at DP.

Keyword.com 10/10
Keyword-Keyword.com ?/10

if you get what i mean ? Do you think domains with HYPHENS in them are worth creating websites on ?

Even google searches dont yield many results with hyphens in them, so how damaging are they ?

Thanks in advance for any light shed on this topic

 

Good question, I wish I knew the answer as some of my domains have hyphens in them as well... anyone?

 

For search engines I don't think it makes any difference. However its just not user friendly.

 

for search engine - will make difference for ex. softwaredevelopment and software-development, in both above softwaredevelopment is consider as 1 word while software-development consider as 2 different word, software and development

 

These would do better on search engines that give more value to domain-based keywords. Google has discounted the weight domain names have. It is not completely worthless, just worth LESS. It has to be paired with other ways to get Google's love--High Quality original content, social support, and nice backlinks.

 

I'd only ever use one hyphen, in a dot com. It just doesn't look as professional and your search results click through rate will be slightly lower. It's also harder to say the domain out loud and tell people about it if it has a hyphen, so word of mouth will be low.

That said, my highest earning website of all time is a dot com with one hyphen, and entrepreneurs-journey.com and digital-photography-school.com both make a lot of money.

 

repeat the same kind will not make any difference and it will look awkward too.. You can use hyphen in domain name, but using the same keyword twice is not advisable.

 

Surely it is not the hyphen that will yield you good ranking. Hyphen will be good when you use long and more than one keywords in the domain. So it makes some sense to user also. Google does stemming so do not worry about the hyphen should be added or not. I think when there is question hyphen should be added or not, always think according to the user perspective. In some domain hyphen has to be there like www . experts-exchange . com. Else it would become "expertsexchange".

Find good detail here: http://seojsolutions.blogspot.com/search/label/Why hyphen?

 

I think better to use one Hyphen. It is more visible to human eye, we can expect much more CTR than one word domain.

 

As far as I know you will have no problem with Google for a having a hyphen in the domain name, sometimes may be more difficult for a person to remember your exact domain and may enter it without the hyphen and someone else(providing they have the same domain without the hyphen) will be getting alot of your traffic.

 

I do not think a hyphen makes any difference to google but it surely reduces your site recall capability for a layman.

In case your domain name gets good publicity, there is high chance that your visitor would land up on a domain name as similar to yours but without a hyphen in it!

Regards,

RightMan

 

I'd say for SEO/rankings that hyphens don't make much or any difference.

But obviously if you want type in traffic or are trading domains then the hyphen makes a huge difference - the wrong way.

 

it makes difference ... appleorange.com and apple-orange.com both domain has a difference in the eyes of search engine. 1st domain name is one complete one word for google and in 2nd domain google can read one by one

 

It doesn't matter too much..
Since, the keyword already existed in the domain, it is bound to help.
I'll rate it 7/10.

 

yeah the problem would be in differentiating your domain from a domain that didn't use the hyphen but had the same name. though I don't read anything that indicates that the search engines penalize or anything for use of hypens, in fact they are quite common on larger sites when there are many pages (but the primary domain I don't see that much use of a hyphen - though a main website in my niche does use that in their primary domain name and are very successful)

 

it won't make a difference when it comes to rankings at all, but its just so unprofessional in my point of view, as when you tell others about your website..

eg you have a site called buycarpets. it sounds good, if a business associate asks about your site and you tell them its buy dash carpets then it sounds awful, and more difficult to remember

 

Hyphens in url is ok. But more than 3 hyphen look like keyword stuff. Ranking is another factor, visit http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors for ranking factor.

 

These days domain keywords don't effect much to rankings of google. I have experienced it but I am not sure it it is true for all.

 

The generally accepted rule for SEO is that you have no more than 2 hyphens. So, if your domain name has two, your pages should have none.

/*tom*/

 

It's okay to have one hyphen, the search engines won't mind. However, if you have a domain name like what-do-you-want-common-man.com, then the search engines will mind and you'll probably have a hard time ranking.