Hey guys I am starting this thread because I want to know your views on whether the url of your website will affect your search engine ranking well, my view is that url DOES affect your rankings. whats yours?
If URL contains the necessary keyword, then YES it will affect SERPs, just because keyword in a URL is the best place to have a keyword
Yes, they do, and if you can't get a domain name with your chosen keyword, you always have the option to include it as a subdomain http://nintendo.widget-stuff.com or directory name: http://www.widget-stuff.com/nintendo-wii/ (these are dummy domain names by the way!)
How do search engines feel about hyphens in the URL? is my-own-website.com better or worse than myownwebsite.com in terms of SEO? what are peoples thoughts?
Hyphens will work well if you cant get the un-hypenated domain. Not sure if they are better or not. Hypens are better for file names but i dont know if they make a difference in the url. Site users will of course prefer un-hyphenated domain names.
domains with Hyphens are not recc because people will forget to type them or it doest not look proff, but for search engine keywords seperated with Hyphens are good, then your domain with be 100% revelant to search word if u have 2 or 3 words as keyword. finally keywords in domain name is very important that is basic point in seo called organic or physical seo.
Keyword in a domain does help the site's rankings but i am not too sure about the SEO advantage of the hyphenated domains over the non hyphenated ones.
I beg to differ, if you search for "Celebrity Gossip" on google, the first website doesn't have any keywords in the url, but the second one does. The reason may have to dowith the size of the first website in comparison to the second, but is there any other reason why that may have happened?
keywords are just a small part of seo... on a fast aproximation i would say the keyword in domain name weights about 10/1000 also note that if your domain name is something like my-site-about-keyword1-and-keyword2-keyword3.com you might be filtered by some spam filters
If all other things are equal the non-hyphen domain will have preference over a domain with hyphens. Since all things being equal is rarely the case it is difficult to decern by conducting sample searches but I have a partner who owns both versions and the approximation I stated is accurate from what he and I can tell. Hyphen domains are looked at as SEO tactics but don't have a lot of problems unless they are going head-to-head with a non-hyphenated domain or if they clearly represent a "Keywords-Gone-Wild" version as drhyperlaur demonstrated. Good luck.
This question came up in a seminar I attended by Google this week. A URL with hypens is easier for the spider to read if the URL has more than one word. Google recommends hypenated URLs. Google did warn not to stuff the hypenated URL with spam keywords. Five or fewer words should not present a problem unless your words are unrelated to each other and/or to the site and obvious spam. My opinion is that you have to weigh this with the difficulty hypens present for users to remember and for domain resale because hypened domains have a lower market value.
What about two domain names, both pointing to the same site? Suppose you can't get the domain you'd like. Lets say bestbuys.com. What if you got best-buys.com and kathysbestbuys.com? Would that be OK, or is it bad to use 2 domain names for one site?
The Googlebot would like best-buys.com The Googlebot doesn't like mirror sites. But, if you did a 301 redirect moving kathysbestbuys.com to best-buys.com, that should be OK. This way those who enter kathysbestbuys.com would automatically be redirected to best-buy.com. You only need to have content on best-buy.com and you and Googlebot and user will be happy. 301 is the only redirect that isn't penalized by Google.