Hyphen or not hyphen?

[abo28]

What kind of keyword-rich domains have more chances to rank high: with or without hyphen? For example...

cholesteroldiettips.com OR cholesterol-diet-tips.com

Any thoughts or advice? Thank you.

[awarum]

yup search engines will figure it out. Usually, if your domain is yourlongdomainname.com and you mention "Your Long Domain Name" in title of your page, you are basically listing out the keywords that search engines should focus on. I did reading a blog post by matt cutts where he did recommended using - to make it easier on search engines.

[sprakash]

The domains with hyphen also get high ranking, there is no problem with hyphen OR without hyphen in SEO. It would be better to choose without hyphen domain if it is available then choose with hyphen if its not available, better is with 1 hyphen instead of 2-3 hyphens.

[Highdefinition]

Originally Posted by abo28

What kind of keyword-rich domains have more chances to rank high: with or without hyphen? For example...

cholesteroldiettips.com OR cholesterol-diet-tips.com

Any thoughts or advice? Thank you.

The one with most relevant theme and quality content, plus with the most quality backlinks

[ARVolund]

From a strictly search engine standpoint it does not matter. You can rank with one as easy as the other. If you plan on getting all your traffic from searches go for the hyphens if you want.

People do seem to care some, so if you were going to build a site that your were going to brand and get visitors from other places then I would personally stay away from the hyphens.

Richad

Originally Posted by abo28

What kind of keyword-rich domains have more
chances to rank high: with or without hyphen? For example...

cholesteroldiettips.com OR cholesterol-diet-tips.com

Any thoughts or advice? Thank you.

[steven-brandon88]

if the exact match domains are taken then it means you will have stiff competition.

personally i dont like hyphen because my exact matches without hyphens almost always perform better than ones with hyphens.

hope this helps

[mainstreetcm]

In my experience I have not noticed a difference. I use hyphens if the exact domain in a .com is gone and I am going to rely solely on search engines for traffic. However, if I am using the website to build a brand, will be getting traffic from other venues I definitely go for a hyphen less domain.

[roxstar]

Well, for SEO, they're basically the same. Search engines are smart enough to see the keywords.

If I were you, I would go for the domain name without the hyphens since it's also a lot easier to type in.

However, I think that having a short, catchy domain name is a lot better. And if it has some SEO benefits, then that's good.

(Note: This is if you're building a website you're going to be in for a long time... Niche sites could just be keywords).

[paulgl]

Matt Cutts talks about hypens for urls, but domains?
That's another matter.
Domains can rank for whatever they want.

Highdefinition said it best:

The one with most relevant theme and quality content, plus with the most quality backlinks

You want to separate words in a domain so as not to run
words together that can be misconstrued.

An underscore should never be an option. An underscore looks
like a blank. Dashes are more likely (99.99%) to be seen as
a space.

If people are relying on keywords in a domain to give them some
sort of boost, then logically speaking, it should make no difference,
if we are going by sheer words. student-loan and student_loan
have the same words, right?

But google does make a distinction between one_two and one-two.
one_two may appear to be one word. (plug in whatever you want
for one and two). If you use the underscore, people will need
to be searching for one_two in order for your site to most likely
come up. But who searches for that? People search for one two.
And that's why the dash is important. Now one-two will show up.

Let's quote an old Matt Cutts blog post:
"So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″ "

If you don't put a dash, and your words can meld together, then
google may have a hard time figuring out exactly what words are
there if it is not a common phrase.

Google does not penalize for underscores, but may not treat it the
way it was intended.

Paul

[swayman]

You can ranked top 3 for sellling blue widgets using a totally different name such as www.domain.com, what really matters is your backlinks' hyperlinks.

[jijaybajay]

not hypen of course

[Gokhan Yildirim]

For SEs, it doesn't matter. However, for humans, I believe that hyphenated URLs look spammy and somewhat less reliable/professional.

[Reverb]

If you're trying to build a brand and/or get traffic based on people remembering your domain name, then I'd definitely avoid hyphens. Visitors would have to remember the dashes, or if you verbally tell someone your URL you have to say "dash" for every dash/hyphen in the address and it gets confusing. I'd say, to most people domain names without hyphens look more professional.

[inspiro]

Personally, I would choose a domain without hyphens. Not only is it easier to tell other people your domain name, it also looks less spammy in my eyes as well as search engines.

I think hyphens in directory names, however, help in SEO and look fine (again, as long as there aren't too many).

[freddy smith]

question here :

aeroairmattresshub.com or aeroair-mattress.com

or what about

theaeroairmattress.com or aeroairmattresshub.com


please experts give your thought in term of SEO

[Marketing Ignite]

i would try to keep away from the hyphens in the TDL. For the internal pages, use hyphens instead of underscores as the hyphens separate the words according to Matt Cutts Google engineer..