Hypens in your domains

[jamiedolan]

HI,

Based on some limited testing I did, I found that having a domain with a hyphen in it in addition to the one without, appeared to increase my overall SERP.

Example; I had the domain firstnamelastname.com then I added firstname-lastname.com (I did a 301 redirect on the second one back to the first site)

I am wondering if this is the typical experience, where adding in an additional domain with hyphens where there are spaces is of benefit, or if it was a fluke in my testing.

What do you think, is it worth it to register the domain with hyphens in it if it is available?

If you were setting up this site right now and had the choice, for maximum SEO, would you have also registered warrior-forum.com?

Thanks!

[lerxtjr]

I'm skeptical about that one. Ever since Google announced years ago that it was able to parse keywords that were meshed together, nobody I know in the biz has bothered to focus on hyphenated domain names. They might register them and do a url forwarding just so that competitors cannot buy them up, but that's the only reason.

[Fernando Veloso]

Have some sites with - domains and don't see anything unusual. Some rank high, some rank low.

[jamiedolan]

Originally Posted by lerxtjr

Ever since Google announced years ago that it was able to parse keywords that were meshed together

Perhaps, because it was with my name Google was not about to 100% determine were the word seperation belonged. I can see how they would be able to easily tell with dictionary words, so perhaps the only benefit would be when your using names or other non-dictionary words.

Thanks

[lerxtjr]

hmm, I could see that being possible with a personal name that things would be different. Like if you were known in your industry as John J. Smith and someone searched for you as "john smith" I wonder if there would be any better search result for john-j-smith.com versus johnjsmith.com. Dunno about that one.