Is it true that google reads "-" on domain as space? like for example www.police-car.com --> www police car com www.policecar.com --> www policecar com so if someone type "police car" on google search most likely "www.police-car.com" will get a higher SERP than "www.policecar.com" is that true? And do you recommend using hypens on domain? Thanks!
Google is smart enough to figure it on domain names - and you won't rank higher with one or the other. I would never choose a hyphen over a non-hyphen domain. Visitors won't remember the hyphen and you'll be sending traffic to the non-hyphen domain.
mjewel I know it wont rank me higher but what I'm talking about is about hyepn on domain only setting aside other factors like backlinks etc. What if I will focus more on traffic and unique visitors coming from search engine like Google you think it is better to choose a domain with hypen? Because I read on seo-gold.com that Search Engines read it as space. I don't know if seo-gold is upated or not but here's the article it's under Why Hyphenated Domain Names? http://www.seo-gold.com/seo-tutorial/domain-name-choice What do you think?
It's not much of a big deal anymore. Although I still use hypens anyways, especially in file names and directory URLs on my static sites.
I buy domains with hyphens coz without may cost 10K..crazy. I still have my keywords in my domain that google loves.
Either way is fine for the domain name from an SEO perspective... However, I ALWAYS choose non-hyphenated domains because they are shorter, easier to remember, easier to type, easier to say... It's better from a user perspective to have domains without hyphens IMO. I do the exact opposite on the folder and file names in my URLs. I ALWAYS hyphenate them since most users are NOT going to bother remembering URLs to deep pages on your site. But they will frequently want to remember your home page (i.e. your domain). There really is no difference from an SEO perspective in most cases unless you own a domain like expertsexchange.blah and you want to make SURE it's interpretted as and ranks for "experts exchange" and not returned as a search results for "expert sex change". Having hyphens in this case (experts-exchange.com) will prevent it from naturally ranking as an exact domain match for a search for "expert sex change". Google has been matching multiple keywords in domains without hyphens since their beginning (as have all the engines). Originally ALL domains were hyphenless. It was only when most of the good hyphenless domains were taken that people started using hyphens.
i learned this lesson the HARD WAy, in late 2006 i registered 40 domains (my first adsense sites), 25 of them were domains with dashes, and the rest were exact matches of my targeted keywords (mostly .net and .org without dashes) i used the dashes with com's since all the domains without dashes were already taken, the results was that all my net and org sites achieved great rankings after just 2-3 months while none of the domains with the dashes ranked for their 's exact keyword combination, i had to drop all those domains a year later because they only made a few dollars each from long tail keywords because of my unique articles, i will not claim that i know exactly the answer to your question, but all what i can say is that personally i would never register a domain with dashes again.
Like others have mentioned. Dashes don't seem to effect SERPs anymore, and not only that domains with out dashes seem to have a more professional look to them and are easier to remember.
would go for the non-hyphenated ones, just like what mjewel said that visitors might forget the hypens so better go with non-hyphenated domains.
Initially let us know the percentage of the direct searching against with the organic searching because from there if we found out that we have a higher percentage of direct searching compare to organic searching then we are no longer include hyphen as our domain. Normally users would not love to type hyphen on the browser and they easily forget those special characters so tendency they will not be able to reach the exact site they want. But if organic searching is very much higher with the direct searching then we will include hyphen as part of the domain because google will actually determine and be able to index the keyword based on the domain and your site is more likely visible at the top of SERP. So these are just scenarios and factors i think we need to analyze before we take a move. hope this helps.
I prefer the hyphen. I think hardly anyone actually types in a domain name, in fact I think lots of people don't even know how to type in a URL - they just type it in google.(look at the highest searches in google) Thus if someone is looking at serps a domain name with a hyphen is easier on the eye and easier to read for the normal punter (which is why everyone has hyphens in their directories)