Domain Name Dilemma: Do Dashes or Underscores Goose Google Rankings More?

Since almost every good domain without dashes have been taken up. It makes sense to have a domain name with dashes rather than having a cryptic and long domain name with dashes.

 

Dashes may help to properly identify the keywords you want instead of having people or search engines misunderstand.

Examples: phonesexposed, phone-sex-posed, phones-exposed.

I'm sure you can think of others.

 

thanks, especially for the tools link.

 

have you checked the thread date? it's nearly 2 years old

 

Yea i dont even remember posting it. lol

 

Little bit of a backtrack with Matt Cutts and underscores/dashes:

If you read Stephan Spencer’s write-up, he says that underscores are the same as dashes to Google now, and I didn’t quite say that in the talk. I said that we had someone looking at that now. So I wouldn’t consider it a completely done deal at this point. But note that I also said if you’d already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn’t worth trying to migrate all your urls over to dashes. If you’re starting fresh, I’d still pick dashes.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/

 

Thanks you so much for clearing this up. Every little bit helps when the competition is always so close!

 

I reckon this research is flawed. Because no one uses dashes or under scores the search text, but they DO use them in the domain name.

To test this properly you would need the same domain name in three formats, ie

cheap-mobile-phones.com
cheap_mobile_phones.com
cheapmobilephones.com

Now which one would do better on SERPS? That's the real question.

 

I guess Google give a bit more importance to those domain names which are without dashes.
But yeah its always good to go for dashes in your domain name if you are not getting without dashes, rather than going to long domain names.

 

Interesting and quite informative ...

 

I am in favor of Using Hyphens (-), Instead of (_).

 

Thank you! The original post doesn't prove anything at all. I'm not saying that the author isn't correct in stating that dashes are better than underscores. They are, Google has said so themselves. But the method of "proof" is rather silly.

 

Very informative. Thanks

 

dashes doesnt help much with Google ...though yahoo and bing has a totally different algo

 

obviously, dashes are more offective than underscore....optimisation of domain name with dashes are much batter than underscores

 

Insightful replies in this thread.. Dashes don't help in ranking. You need to do thorough keyword research to come up with a good domain names. EMDs work the best, but there are other considerations to make while choosing your domain name, the most important being what the site will be used for.

 

Personally dashes seem more natural than underscores

 

Golfpro1, will dashes help you while getting your site indexed