Hi. What is better, a hyphen in a url or not? My kw would be "political cartoon". Should I take political-cartoon.us or politicalcartoon.us I want one or the other, not both. Which will give my site a higher ranking in google? Thanks!
some will say hyphen... if the content is "right," it won't matter. i would go without, but that's just me. good luck.
If you are selling political cartoons then I would definitely go for the plural political-cartoons.us hyphenated. The advantage of this sort of hyphenation comes because all the unsolicited links will often be in a form similar to this <a href="http://www.political-cartoons.us">www.political-cartoons.us</a></p> but these will automatically have the key phrase in the anchor text, which they wouldn't if you had politicalcartoons.us - Michael
Hyphens make a URL hard to tell your friends about (its often forgot when spoken), and is often used in sites that try to piggy back off typos/guesses on a existing URL, so it has some negitive association with some people. Personaly I dont like domains with hyphens, but its whatever floats your boat I guess. Josh
If I could only choose one (1) it would the the URL without the hyphen. I don't believe one will give you an advantage over the other with Google.
I would buy both, and any other variations you can think of, and point them all to politicalcartoons.com
It is believed that hyphens in the URL are better than underscores or nothing. But, don't get a domain name with hyphens, as it can be tough for people to remember (as mentioned by others). I would recommend getting politicalcartoons.us and then having the pages as: politicalcartoons.us/cartoons.htm politicalcartoons.us/politics.htm politicalcartoons.us/political-cartoons.htm etc.
My Vote: Without a hyphen....especially if you are "telling" people your URL...basic computer users (sadly) may not know where the hyphen is on their keyboard
Great info. thanks. I'm not very concerned about the word of mouth, etc. This is mainly for the search engines and getting a good ranking with them. If one were to give me a better result than the other I'd go with it. I prefer the no hyphen but I have a gut feeling the hyphen will help. Of course the gut feeling could be coming from the beans I just ate. Thanks, A
I know you said you don't want both, but I couldn't give you an honest opinion unless I recomended getting both..... But - I have noticed that the engines seem to be doing a much better job at seperating known dictionary words lately, even if there is no hyphen.......... I believe I started noticing the engine listing the keyword in bold in the url like this: keywordone.com anyone else? hasn't this gotton much more acurate over the last few months?
LOL go with your gut feeling on this one. If you have your keywords in the domain like political-cartoons.us and the keywords in the Title <title>Political Cartoons</title> and the main pages something like this political-cartoons.us/george-bush-political-cartoons.htm you will have a head start no question. That is absolutely true for search and is simply highlighting string occurrences. However so far I have not seen any evidence of de-concatenation of urls for indexing purposes. If (and it's a big IF) branding your site is not an issue then a keyword domain with one or two hyphens is the way to go. - Michael
If my understanding is correct, the SEs see underscores as underscores and hyphens as spaces, but as allready stated they're good at findingwordsin urls. With regard to users remebering the hyphen, I don't see it as a problem. How many people actually remember the URL? Click on a search result, forum signature, email signature, or copy it from some offline marketing material. I certainly only have a couple of URLs commited to memory. Ian PS I'm performing magic on the radio in early March, once I have some more details I'll post it on the anything goes page with a URL so you can listen on the net!
Not exactly. For example the search for 'self storage' is not the same as the search for 'self-storage' as you can verify. The hyphenated search is a search for the term with the hyphen (self-storage), the term without the hyphen (selfstorage) and the term with the hyphen replaced by a space (self storage). Wow! Magic on the radio that is something I have to see Keep us posted please. - Michael
Hyphen is the SEO friendly separator. So using the Hyphen in your Domain Name will be profitable for the SEO purpose.
From experience, having a hypen in the URL doesn't really have a big difference long term. SEO doesn't just rely on your domain name, so don't worry about the little things.