Hello everyone, I know that about a year ago most people would say word1-word2.com would rank better for SEO reasons as opposed to word1word2.com Now about a year later are things the same way or has google got smarter and dash or no dash no longer makes a difference. Apologize in advance if this question has been asked before
I've read a few reports that dashes are bad for SEO. I think so long as you use only 1 dash it's okay. Dashes better than no dashes? Haven't heard that before, and I have no idea why that would be the case.
dashes are better than underscores in urls, simply because it is easier for visitors to read/remember the url (sometimes underscores can look like spaces), in terms of seo i dont think it makes much difference
imo url's with or without dashes are treated the same by search engines though i think they see the one without dashes as natural links
Thanks for your reply but my question is pertaining to dashes within a domain not after it. In other words when it comes to SEO does word1-word2.com have any advantage over word1word2.com ? thanks
Situation: phrase golden west domains: goldenwest.com and golden-west.com People are looking for golden west not for goldenwest In this case wich domain would be better?
I would say (although this has yet to be confirmed by Matt Cutts), that websites with one or two dashes in the domain may have a SLIGHTadvantage to those that don't IF they are using them to separate keywords. However, if you have too many dashes it may be possible that you catch one of Google's fancy filters and it will actual will hurt your rankings. Matt uses dashes in the end part of his url such as http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/ for instance, so apparently they must be useful for the sub-pages of your domain...and I would assume the same for the domain itself as well.
I guess it doesn't matter whether you use dash or not. Your rankings would depend on how well you optimized the site.
Well......its better to avoid dashes or underscores but if needed then using dashes will be always a better choice as Uderscores are considered as spaces by search engines......
Where did you get that kind of informations? That dashes are bad for SEO? You must be joking... As far as I know it can help a little since A hyphen or dash works as a localized EXACT operation...In Search Engine perspective...
ya fair enough.. Although now it looks they both have equal value. It is just to human eye, it looks word1-word2.com looks like better as compared to word1word2.com for search engines.