1. Advertising
    y u no do it?

    Advertising (learn more)

    Advertise virtually anything here, with CPM banner ads, CPM email ads and CPC contextual links. You can target relevant areas of the site and show ads based on geographical location of the user if you wish.

    Starts at just $1 per CPM or $0.10 per CPC.

Pros and cons of hyphenated domain name

Discussion in 'Domain Names' started by Wai_Wai, Sep 23, 2005.

  1. #1
    Hi.
    What are the pros and cons of hyphenated domain name (eg word1-word2.com)? :)

    Here's wht I found so far:
    ==============================

    Pros
    First it is more readable to readers (compare: youarefine vs you-are-fine).
    Second search engine likes "word1-word2" more than "word1word2", although I believe it's going to be of little significance (explanation below). Anyway you may wish to improve as much as possible, so you may wish to consider it.

    Google (so do MSN, Yahoo) like the following naming system:
     Plus (+): hxxp://www.domain.com/word1+word2.htm (fake URL)
     Hyphen (-): hxxp://www.domain.com/word1-word2.htm (fake URL)
    Google (so do MSN, Yahoo) don't like the following naming system:
     No separator: hxxp://www.domain.com/word1word2.htm (fake URL)
     Underscore "_": hxxp://www.domain.com/word1_word2.htm (fake URL)

    For the reasoning and details, see the following:
    ==================
    Search engines give a little weight to keywords found in domain names and URLs. Because URLs and domains do not allow spaces, one must use either underscores or hyphens as word separators (or not use any separators at all).

    Why no underscores?
    Google does not treat underscores as word separators. That's why Google won't consider keyword1_keyword2 as matches to keyword1 and keyword2. Obviously, it is better to use hyphens in your URLs and domains.

    What to do if I have used underscores already?
    If you have already used underscores, don't change your page names to hyphens. The weight given to matches in URLs and domains is not significant enough to be worth the time of waiting that search engines need to recrawl and reindex the changed URLs. You should consider using hyphens for the sites and pages that you are going to make in the future.

    Another benefit of using hyphens
    There's another benefit of using hyphens in the domain names. Many directories link to sites using their domain names as the anchor text. In this case, hyphens will help a lot, because Google will treat them as anchor text matches
    - from seoguide

    Problems of using hyphens
    People may forget the hyphen and type "word1word2.com" as it is the traditional way of typing 2 words. Also it may be a bit harder for someone to spell out the whole URL over phone. Finally the hyphened URL isn't worth as much as non-hyphened URL if you resell your domain name.

    ===========

    Wht do you think?
    Anything to add?
     
    Wai_Wai, Sep 23, 2005 IP