Something that always bugs me is this. To hyphen or not if my domain consists of two or more words. So, basically, if both were free, which one would you register. digital-point-forums.com or digitalpointforums.com From a business standpoint, I think it may be better to just register both, including the .net versions, making it a total of four registerations, and then redirecting them all to the main .com domain or so. But besides that, what other factors do you think plays into this? I've never been a firm believer about the SEO and hyphens relationship. Maybe someone could enlighten me on this? Thanks.
A matter of some debate. My personal preference has always been for no hyphens, apart from anything else I re=arely click on hyphenated domains because they look spammy and I think alot of people arte the same, so you may lose out there. Plus if you are looking at a long term venture and want to build a brand, I don't think hyphens are good. As far as google goes, it can read specific words in urls even when joined together so I wouldn't worry, however if you are optimising for Yahoo then hyphens seem to do marginally better. Overall I'd say go for what looks better and is easier to remember than what will be easiest for short term seo
1. No more than 3 words in the domain 2. No more than 2 dashes 3. No more than 15 characters 4. Use of generic words or one special word that can be brandable Of course these are not strict rules but we discuss what looks better Dashes are OK for SEO but what i worry are the typos If you site becomes popular you can't imagine how much traffic you will loose especially if the site is long or has a lot of typo error percentage Lately for a customer i registered 8 variations of a short name
Hyphens are counted as spaces by search engines, underscores are not. If you don't have some kind of seperator then it sometimes look.......blah For example, instead of buying pontefractyfc I bought pontefract-yfc as the two parts of the domain need to be seperate or it just looks wrong!
u will loose lot of traffic if you buy domains with hyphens, if u have alternative option choose that. you cant brand a domain with hyphen easily.
Engines value dashed and not dashed domains There are cases where the dash worked in favor of the domain However this was not the only reason for the site's rank Dash do helps to see the meaning of the site visually better as you said but what someone should not forget is the type in traffic Tell the name to 10 of your friends today and if 9 of them can't type it tomorrow (and their brain cells are not damaged either) search for another name Type in traffic is the quality traffic king
If you buy a hyphened domain name, and someone manages to get the non-hyphen domain from you..expect them to get alot of your traffic! I inadvertantly registered a domain that has a very popular website with a hyphen and it really rockets the traffic on my box up from all of the people who mistakenly type in the address without the hyphen heh.