Hello, I was wondering which of the following is better when registering a two-word domain name, when the first word ends with the same letter that the second word starts with: To share the letter (pneumoniarticles.tld), place a hyphen between them (pneumonia-articles.tld) or place each word as it is (pneumoniaarticles.tld)? Thanks in advance! P.S. I couldn't find another thread for this. If you do, please notify me so I can tell a mod. Oh, and btw, pneumonia articles is not the domain I want to register, I just changed it for security reasons...
It's for a site in Spanish where I'll place Symbian themes. (In Spanish, the spanish word for "themes" ends too with "s", so there would be an awful double s in the middle.
Combining the letters so the "S" only appears once is a bad decision. It makes the words unparseable for search engines (which may look for keywords in domain names), and makes it impossible to use CamelCase to improve readability. Most users will type the double letters, so you'd have to spend a lot of money brand-building to train them otherwise.
Dont share the letter. Pneumoniaarticles.tld is much better than Penumoniarticles.tld. As somebody mentioned, it will be best to own Pneumoniaarticles.tld and Pneumonia-articles.tld. Adam
The hyphenated domain name is useless, unless it will be your main webpage. There is an overwhelmingly good chance that no one will type in keyword1-keyword2.com. That only leaves the question of: why would you want it to be your main domain vs no hyphen? There are only 4 plausible reasons for choosing a hyphenated domain name as your main one, and only 2 apply to you, though I will name all 4. The 1st 2 do not apply to this situation (presumably): 1. Some sort of stylistic/branding choice, ie. d-ash. It could be based on a potential brandability, or you just like how it looks more. In general, people don't like typing in hyphenated domain names. 2. Domain without the hyphen is taken, and you cannot come up with a reasonable one or one that you like without a hyphen. 3. Two words, when combined, can cause a mix up in the actual parsing of the words. This should not be a problem: you can use meta tags and other SEO tools to show search engines - which are really intelligent when it comes to this sort of thing anyway - what is correct. For example, ChargeRemotes.com -> ChargeR emotes (not a very likely example, but you can see how the combination of those 2 dictionary words can form another 2 dictionary words) 3. To protect your niche. As you can probably tell, these are quite poor reasons to pick a hyphenated domain name. You will very likely not get any traffic or lose any traffic from buying/not buying the domain name respectively. If someone were to try and creep in your niche, they could easily add a couple letters like the suffixes "i" or "e" or "my", etc to your keywords and as far as SERPS go could beat you out just as easily (presuming their SEO skills were better) I don't like the "its just 8 bucks" mentality. Firstly, .coms are 7 bucks. Secondly, 8$ can be invested much more wisely than in a worthless domain. If you keep the attitude "it's only a little money, who cares!" and use it over and over again, suddenly you notice those bills add up, and you've frittered thousands of dollars away, "8 bucks" at a time. Can't tell you what to do, but I hope by now you've realized what the smart decision is. I also acknowledge it took me a while to respond to this, so I hope it's gotten to you in time, or you've made the right decision anyway. GL
wow! Great post! One of my friends also asked for advise whether to use hyphenated or without, I could now answer him not to chose hyphenated unless he has strong reasons and no substitute