I plan on buying a domain soon, do you think dashes make people less likely to visit it? Does it affect how you rank in search engines at all? Thanks
The reason I ask is because I plan on buying computer-cleanup.com, because all other domains I can think of that I may be interested in are taken. Any suggestions?
Well, first of all, I definitely wouldn't be telling everyone what the domain is that you are planning on buying. And second, from my experience dashes or no dashes, it makes no difference. unless-you-of-course-over-do-it-and-have-more-than-a-couple-of-them.com
Keyword rich domain (dashes or no dashes) + Clean code + Good content + Smart optimised links from relative websites = A good beggining
PJK, in competitive market categories domains don't count for much in terms of search. I would suggest you look at the problem from a branding angle.
Yup as dburdon stated it's a branding thing. So lets say I want to make a site about tourism in th UK but UKtravel.com is already taken. Now let's also assume that UKtravel is bigger then me. So I create UK-travel.com. Now what happens is that when you say it to people it's not "UK travel dot com" instead its "UK dash travel dot com". Unfortunately, people often forget the dash and you lose traffic and possibly sales to your competition. Skinny
Well that totally depends on you... If you want a keyword domain... or you want to make a brand of you website... The keyword domain has just an edge over the braded one... but the brand speaks after wards... as people use it here... Shawn could have get any keyword domain name for dp ... but he chose digitalpoint.com and now the name speaks... so i guess you get the point.. take care
Google can separate words pretty well, but the dash does make it clear that these are two words (according to Matt Cutts). I would probably stick with the single word though if I could, it's easyer for a person to remember. I have clients that use the dash and I always have to chekc to be sure where they put it in the URL ie... Was that mt-gatervpark.com, .mtgate-rvpark.com or mtgaterv-park. makes me have to think to hard.
keyword-domain is slightly better for SEO than keywordomain ... but it's very slight and not even noticable in competitive markets. Content, on site optimization / structure, and relevant backlinks are much more important.
This might interest you: www. mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/ without the space (I can't post live links yet)
I do not know for other people but if I were them, the existence of more than one hyphen appear crappy to me and I'll not visit it.
Not digital-point.com which was already taken when Shawn got digitalpoint.com He probably didn't want it anyway but that is another matter. - Michael
If you are planin to put keywords in your domain ( seo wise) then hypes (-) are really very good as (-) are taken as space for SE. if you chose domain www. 12 .com and www. 1-2 .com ( where 1 and 2 are your keywords) then www . 1-2 .com will give you better and faster results
if you're holding into 2 keyword phrase, then the dash would be a good separator. i guess it somewhat affects the domain, since it'll be considered as 2 words, rather than having it sans the dash/hyphen since SEs may consider it as one whole word.
I run a dash domain (www.hiphop-battles.com) for about 3 years now. We took this domain because hiphopbattles.com was already taken. The only problem with this domain is, that we send a lot of traffic to the domain hiphopbattles.com because people forget to type in the dash. The domain without dash is for sale. As we started it cost 800$, the price now is over 4000$ because we send a LOT of traffic to this domain by typein errors. The success of a site is only influenced in a small part from the domain (unless your domain is very hard to memorise) but dash domains will produce typein errors