.net or hyphens in .com domain names?

[K Meier]

Hi there,

I have several niches that I want to register a domain name for, unfortunately most .com names are already taken.

So I was thinking about going for the .net version or a .com version with hyphens ( - ) between keywords.

What is better?

I am trying to use them as blogs with adsense on them, start building basic SEO and them flip them.

Thank you

EDIT:
What about prepositions in domain names?
Ex:
thekeyworddomain.com
nowkeyworddomain.com
mykeyworddomain.com
whykeyworddomain.com

Anyone know how much this would affect adsense or ranking in google?

[Mike McAleer]

Blogs with adsense... hmmmm.

don't think .com will truly matter but I need a better idea of the keywords you are going to be using...

[Richard N Adams]

Hi Londrag,

I've had plenty of success with both though given the choice I would personally now choose to opt for the .net without the hyphens rather than the .com with the hyphens.

All the best,
Richard

[Alexa Smith]

Personally I prefer a hyphenated .com.

I don't like not owning the .com version of my domain-names (though it isn't by any means the one I necessarily choose to use, myself).

Generally, the .com may be a little bit better for resale purposes, and as you're planning to sell, that might matter quite a bit?

Hyphens don't affect SEO at all (there's a video of Matt Cutts explaining this in a similar thread, here).

[K Meier]

Well, they are not really blogs. More like infos, news and articles about that niche.

I don't want to reveal the exact keywords, but parent keywords are car insurance, dental plans, cloud services, dog training.

[Coby]

I've used both, seems to be that then non-hyphenated seem to index and rank faster, but it could have just been a fluke with the ones I used. I owned about 5 hyphenated domain names....

Now, with some experience, if possible I would go for the .net w/o hyphens before using the hyphenated version, but if neither were available I'm not against using a hyphenated domain, even a .info...

The importance should be more on getting your keywords in the domain name rather than rather or not you have hyphens...

Find the closest match to your keywords and go for it...

Good luck

[K Meier]

Thanks guys

Another quick question. What about adding extra words to the domain name? Like "the", "new", "my", "why"?
I'm trying to keep it as short as possible and trying to make sure that the extra keyword is not a real word, rather a preposition.
Is my assumption right? Or does it not matter at all?

[WDM]

I was reading this thread hoping someone might have done a study or knows of a case study for customer / viewer preference. Do people trust .net any less than .com? I wonder...I personally prefer .com...whenever I see a .net for some reason I feel that site is inferior to the .com site even though I know it has absolutely nothing to do with it hahah

[K Meier]

I went through several 100 recent flippa listing

The only thing I got there is:

• Most domains sold are .com
• brand new .com domains sell very well, even without revenue.
• most brand new .com domains that sell well do not have hyphens
• there are more .net domains sold, than .com with hyphens

As soon as a website has proven revenue (even just 1 week adsense), it doesn't matter if it's .com or .net, they sell for 3 to 12 times it's monthly revenue.

[HN]

I don't understand people's obsession with dot coms. What I do is register a premium domain on some exotic tld like money.ee and then you can create unlimited subdomains like make.money.ee or managing.money.ee or get.money.ee etc. or get a reviews.ee and do product.reviews.ee car.reviews.ee
In my opinion a premium domain at exotic TLD is worth more than some keyword loaded dot com. Unless the latter has a ton of traffic.
Having keywords1.keyword2.net is as good as keyword1keyword2.com
The trick is to have at least one keyword in the domain and the rest in subdomain.
I really don't like hyphens. Using subdomains is good to create keyword rich urls. If you are building sites to sell then get the com. As I said people are obsessed with coms.
Do exotic TLDs sell for high price? seo.de sold for $20,000. stay.nl sold for $8,000 and forums.de sold for $35,000
So I got myself a seo.hn it even makes sense since it has my initials in domain extension.
Do exotic TLD's rank in Google? Absolutely. Search for 'mike filesaime' and you'll see the #3 is ppc.bz which is country code for Belize.

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by HN

I don't understand people's obsession with dot coms.

When you're building sites to flip, as the OP of this thread is, understanding it isn't too relevant. What matters is that they have a bigger resale market and may therefore be worth more. The perception is more significant than the reality.

I think the obsession arises because marketers tend to think with their marketers' hats on. Some make the mistake of imagining that customers react to things the same way that marketers do.

Last year I asked all the people on my lists which domain-names they prefer to see on "my sort of sites", and was a little surprised that a considerable majority of those expressing a preference actually prefer to see ".info" rather than ".com", because they think of them as "informational sites".

There's a kind of consensus among customers (though clearly not among marketers!) that a .info will be an informative site, whereas a .com is "just people trying to sell things". Again, the perception may be more significant than the reality.

[shuvo]

Try alternative keywords.If not then to me those .net or adding hyphen in domain really does not matter.Its all about optimizing your site well with content and SEO to beat your competitors.

[K Meier]

Originally Posted by HN

I don't understand people's obsession with dot coms.

Honestly? Neither do I.
But since I am flipping the domains, I want to attract the biggest audience, and if 99% of sold domains on flippa are .coms, then that's the way to go I guess.

Unless I get a .net domain and start some basic SEO work to get revenue on it, then it seems that people are interested in them again, at least on flippa.com

My main problem is, I worked in IT for a long time, and I tend to think different than regular people.

For example, I know that many .info domains are used by spammers, for that reason when I see a .info domain on google, I avoid it automatically, while the regular average joe tends to think that .info domains are non comercial domains where he would simply get free information.

[HN]

Sorry, I missed the part that you are flipping the sites. But how about instead of using
thekeyworddomain.com nowkeyworddomain.com
see what keyword tool suggest and add one more keyword to the domain name.
I think postpositions are better than prepositions , so keyworddomainnow.com
Oops, I am thinking SEO again, if you want to flip then probably make them appealing to buyer not search engine. so prefixes like e-, i-, u- as well as short words that you suggested would do, I guess.

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by HN

how about instead of using
thekeyworddomain.com nowkeyworddomain.com
see what keyword tool suggest and add one more keyword to the domain name.
I think postpositions are better than prepositions

Absolutely.

I find it kind of scary that (in other conversations) so many people seem not to appreciate this - and it's a big and important point.

I'm always reassured when Gene Pimentel, who I think knows more about domain-names than most people here will ever learn, says so, too. I suspect that even for resale that might matter a little bit - because some people - at least - agree about it.

[Vlad Romanov]

from what i read hyphens are ignored by google... But it is all speculations. As far as I can tell when you search for a keyword it will highlight the domain name regardless if there are hyphens or no

[HN]

Originally Posted by NastyDevil

from what i read hyphens are ignored by google... But it is all speculations. As far as I can tell when you search for a keyword it will highlight the domain name regardless if there are hyphens or no

It will even highlight the TLD, eg. if you search for 'come to' you get vvww.come.to/

Might be a good idea to get a domain with your keyword in TLD like .info or like when you search for 'what is IM' you get vvww.whatis.im/
IM is highlighted. I am trying to get this to #1 even though there are 5 Billion competing websites.

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by NastyDevil

from what i read hyphens are ignored by google... But it is all speculations.

Google, and Matt Cutts in particular, have gone to great lengths to to clarify that hyphens in domain-names have no relevance to SEO. He's said it on his own blog, on Google's blog, and has even released videos explaining it. Unless you really want to "speculate" that he's blatantly and consistently lying about it for some bizarre reason best known to himself, ND, it simply isn't speculation.

[Fazal Mayar]

hyphens dont really matter that much for seo. go for a .net too because .net or .com doesnt matter in search engines no? even .info...

[Vlad Romanov]

Originally Posted by Alexa Smith

Google, and Matt Cutts in particular, have gone to great lengths to to clarify that hyphens in domain-names have no relevance to SEO. He's said it on his own blog, on Google's blog, and has even released videos explaining it. Unless you really want to "speculate" that he's blatantly and consistently lying about it for some bizarre reason best known to himself, ND, it simply isn't speculation.

oh thanks for clearing that up. I didnt know he mentioned that on his videos, I just read it on the forums and obviously dont take it to be 100% accurate, thats why i said it was speculations.

[pmbrent]

.net is ok but I would stay away from using hyphens in domain names. You want to keep it as short and easy to remeber as possible.

[KristofSX]

according to FastAttackSEO by Craig Mako - .info also is good for SEO

[HN]

Hyphens as well as TLD don't matter for google, but I think it matters for potential buyer. I personally find hypnens ugly. Also If I am creating a brand for say word1-word2.com then person that owns non-hyphen word1word2.com will enjoy a lot of free traffic. Since people will be going there my mistake or out of curiosity. You would think that they will bookmark the site, but I recently learned how newbies open up internet sites. They do to google and type your URL in the search box. When I asked what you are doing, the person said, this is how internet works - you go to google and google opens a website. LOL And these are the people we are trying to sell something to.
Right now I have this dilemma I found a 2 word dot com that is selling for $1600. It's not worth that money but I really don't want to register hyphenated version or dot net for the reasons I mentioned. The name is good to create a brand and register a company with this name, but it's useless for SEO only 91 exact match searches, although it has 110,000 broad global monthly searches.
So I think a lot depends what the end user needs the website for. If you make a simple site and sell for a few hundred it doesn't matter, but it the price is in thousands it makes a big difference. But what do I know, I 've only sold 1 website in my life and that was 9 years ago. The other one I tried to sell, I got a letter from eBay cause I had suffix 'bay' in my domain name. The site had 15,000 visitors per day, so they wanted to 'steal' it from me.

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by KristofSX

according to FastAttackSEO by Craig Mako - .info also is good for SEO

It's been very good to me, certainly.

Most of my niche sites are on .info domains, and I have no trouble ranking them. (I do buy the .com's as well, just to make sure that nobody else can buy them - but typically I just redirect them to the .info and build my site on the .info - my customers tell me they prefer that, and theirs is the opinion that matters, after all).

[LaunchBrain.com]

I've neither noticed any difference between with and without dashes for SEO interms of usability, it doesn't do you any favour because people forget the hyphens...

[WDM]

@Alexa What kind of site do you normally put onto a .info? Are you using them for selling or adsense? I guess my more direct question is does it seem to affect monetizing them at all?

Thanks

[John A]

Go for the .net, definitely.

If you are buying a domain with hyphens, make sure that it hasn't got more than 2-3 hyphens.

[Heavenstorm]

Originally Posted by John A

Go for the .net, definitely.

If you are buying a domain with hyphens, make sure that it hasn't got more than 2-3 hyphens.

just wondering whats up with 2-3 hyphens? will that affect anything?

[activ4232]

My experience would suggest that you go with .com if available, since the general public are most comfortable with that still...hence have a better chance of remembering your full domain URL. However, if your .com with the keywords + "the", or "my", or "-", are taken...then consider .net, then consider others. I feel that it would be nice for all the keywords to be in the domain name itself for a variety of reasons...if not there, consider including them in one of your domain's directory folder names.

[CatherineMay]

I've just finished reading this interesting thread. but am surprised there was no mention at all of the .org extension.

In my experience, I haven't been able to tell any difference at all in .com, .net, or .org in terms of ranking.

I have no idea how .org fares when it comes to selling, since I have yet to try selling any website.


Catherine

[cfl]

Domain extension is not an matter , We can rank any domain if we work properly

[JSProjects]

I would take the .net 100/100 times. People worry that .net, .info, etc are harder to rank. I disagree.

[howinfo]

If your hart is set on .com then you can try this tool here: Find keyword domains, it might give you some new or fresh ides for your keyword.