Hi all, It appears that a good domain name can be a great benefit for SEO. For example if you want to optimize the keyword "my keyword" then having a domain name mykeyword.com is a strong benefit. would a domain name with dashes like my-keyword.com have comparable benefits? If not would it have any benefits? Any advice is much appreciated.
I wouldn't go crazy with the dashes. Any more then 2 and you start to really devalue the keywords. I even try to avoid 2 especially in the domain name.
Yes it does help. For how long we don't know, because google make the rules, then move the goalposts half way thru the game. It is their ball, they call the shots!
Two dashes is totally acceptable, but after that you are risking penalties. I know personally that I don't click on sites that have four or more dashes, so I wouldn't be suprised if Google had something in their formula to account for those bogus sites with a ton of dashes. Having dashes definitely helps after the domain too. IE mydomain.com/long-tail-keyword.html
wow thanks I thought that "-" is really bad to have. I have 2 .com with them that are really good. Thanks.
Dashes are considered spaces by the search engines and spam by humans. Domains with 1 or 2 dashes may have good SEO value but I personally wouldn't go with them because they are not good for branding and are usually associated with spam.
Out of 4 sites I have with 2 or more dashes only 1 rocks. The rest struggle with the same promotion. I try to get a clean "no dash" domain whenever possible.
Dashes are (almost) irrelevant in domain name from the search engine perspective. Why you should avoid dashes is just for the human subjective reasons. For example if you tell someone my site is "my dash first dash site dot com" they are likely to forget about it very soon. I say almost because if your name consists of multiple keywords then google can have hard time splitting them and. I wrote an article about a tricktrick to discover if google can split your keywords. Using dashes to split keywords in url filenames is not only harmless from seo perspective, but a recommended practice. Hope that's helpful.
Freediver does have a point. Take Experts Exchange [link: experts-exchange.com] for instance. What if the domain name for their site was expertsexchange.com instead? Would that be treated by the search engines as two keywords (Experts Exchange) or three keywords (Expert Sex Change) instead? Bear in mind though that it's not always spammy (for this reason). Sometimes, you have no choice BUT to use a dashed version for your domain name, especially if the domain name happens to be a proper name.
Dashes are used in the context of search engines as negation operators. This means that searches including a dash prefix ("-term") will actually prevent that term from being listed in the results. And the benefit of including URLs inciting people to exclude results like your own URLs is...
Yes, domain name with dashes is readable by spiders. The advisable number of keywords in your domain are 4 separated by dashes.