Hello all, I keep reading controversial things about the using of hyphens in your domain name. So, I'd like to have some opinions from you fellow DPers: is it good to use hyphens? And why? Thanx in advance.
I just asked the same thing in another thread, but I got the impression hyphens were bad. Maybe someone can enlighten us.
If I can get the whole domain without hyphens then thats what I will do, However, if it is not available, then I will use hyphens I have several domains with hyphens and have noticed no difference in the way they perform in the serp's If you had domains such as cocacola.com and coca-cola.com and both of those names were equally optimized (on page and off page)... I suspect that cocacola.com would rank better
I don't think the search engines would give any kind of advantage or disadvantage based on the use of a single dash in the domain name. That would be unfair for those websites. Why should the search engines care if you use a dash anyway? They might treat websites with multiple dashes differently. A lot of spammers use domains with more than one dash. The search engines may have decided that since so many of the multi-dash websites are spam, it is worthwhile to penalize such websites. I'm probably wrong and there are such domains that rank well, but it's not something you see often. Then again that might just be because white hat seos prefer domains opposite of what spammers use.
Though if you get a domain name with hyphens like i-see-you.com there is nothing bad with it an it will rank the same in the search engine.
So using hyphens is just another way to get a domain name that is already taken. Like if you are selling the same product, in the same region as someone else but they already have the optimum domain name, then I could use the hyphenated version.
It may not be perfect but a domain with 1 or 2 -'s is still decent if it's a .com. Remember we are running out of good short .com domains so you have to use what's available. I've had good success with and without -'s
I've read several times on DP that - are good for word separation, but underscores_aren't. The thing about trying to make this decision is no matter what you do decide on, Google will no doubt come up with something that will lead it into the other direction! So, it might be just dandy today, but lookout for tomorrow
In the root domain I would attempt to avoid them just for a users sake. SEs really don't care. However, for actual pages in the site http://domain.com/PAGE-HERE hyphens are good because they separate content. This was even in the SEO guide Google released not long ago.
In SE point of view there is nothing bad if you are using a hyphen (1 hyphen)in your URL but it's not look fair for professionals and businesses.
I'm not much of a fan of hypens. If I can't find the domain I want, I create my own. Maybe the reason for this is I also hate going to sites with hypens in their URL.
I have had success getting sites listed and ranked well with two hyphens, but none of the domains I've ever had with more than two hyphens have done well. It could be a coincidence, but that has been my experience.
I'll certainly agree with that comment. I don't type fast to start with and that only makes it harder and take longer. The most annoying thing for me is really long domain names. Short and sharp is nice.
I-am-glad-you-did One thing you need to remember is Google will never tell the truth. They create propaganda to keep webmasters in the dark. I wrote about this a while ago Google search search engine optimization en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization # 1 result search engine marketing en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_marketing # 1 result As you can see the page naming convention uses underscores Remember believe half what you read and none of what you hear.....