Dashed-domains: Do they suck, after all?

by lexilexi

Posted: 14 years ago 26 replies

INTERNET MARKETING

After lots of experiments I'm coming to the conclusion that dashed domains i.e.

your-domain-sucks.com

are disliked by google, but liked by yahoo and bing.

What's your experience? I was told a while ago that google treats the dash as if it were a space, but my experience is showing otherwise.

Google's results seem to suggest that yourdomainsucks

sucks less than your-domain-sucks.

And I'm not seeing many dashed domains in the big G's top 10...

#dasheddomains

dave147 14 years ago

[DELETED]

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- lexilexi 14 years ago
  
  Glad to hear you say that. I've had good results with undashed, and link building.
  
  I'm just wondering about this dashed-keyword-domain site I have that's no.2 in yahoo and bing for the KW (wiki page is no. 1) but its at #150 ish in Google even though it has much better links than the competition. No doubt I'll get it there with enough link building, just wondering what the reason might be for such disparity between the engines... before I go and buy a whole stack of juicy dashed domains I just uncovered....
  
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lexilexi 14 years ago

Anyone else chime in on this?
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John Romaine 14 years ago

I use dashed domains successfully without any issues, both on Yahoo and Google.
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lexilexi 14 years ago

Thanks folks. FYI My last comment wasn't directed at your comment Dave... we posted at around the same time...
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Maria Gudelis 14 years ago

I've got dashed domains on google page one without any issues as well.
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Gary King 14 years ago

I'm on page 1 of google with dashed domains. You can take it over the top (IHMO) of course...

To follow your example:

your-domain-really-really-really-truly-stinks.com

may be a bit much. :-)
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lexilexi 14 years ago

LMAO Gary, glad you spotted the joke...
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lexilexi 14 years ago

Ok here's another question... what about partially dashed and partially not. For example, I just noticed that vintage-engagmentrings.com is available. "Vintage engagement rings" has an exact match of 33,100 in Adwords keyword tool and an avg CPC of $1.30 Could be a useful score and I noticed that antique-engagementrings.com and other similar ones are taken. Anyone any experience with this sort of domain? There's a lot of these type up for grabs.
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Deepak Media 14 years ago

There are too many variables to consider.

www. entrepreneurs-journey .com - This guy has monsterous traffic through Google and it is a very successful blog.

It all comes down to content!
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- croutz 14 years ago
  
  Search the term dog training in Google. dog-obedience-training-review.com is #1.
  
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- AllThingsArePossible 14 years ago
  
  google dislikes dashes in domains because it looks spammy
  
  it's way easier to rank in yahoo and bing for dash domains
  
  I'm sure you one can rank dash domain name for page one on google but I believe it will be easier to rank faster with a non dashed domain name
  
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lexilexi 14 years ago

@ Allthingsarepossible - this concurs exactly with what I have found. You can still get there with the dashes, just harder work. Seems yahoo places more weight on whether the TLD has the keyword in it.

For the kind of sites I am considering the domains, they are for SEO traffic targeted very specifically at single keyword phrases.

@croutz - awesome. I just entered dog-obedience-training-review.com
into yahoo site explorer; site has 4,025 inbound links. 2nd place site has 1,727. 3rd place site has 130. Not that this counts for everything, but it counts for a lot. Site in question is also no. 1 in bing...... but isn't in the top 30 in yahoo.
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Marhelper 14 years ago

Dash domain = Numero Uno on page 1 of Big "G."
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- Kay King 14 years ago
  
  google dislikes dashes in domains because it looks spammy
  
  No, they don't. I've used both dashed and undashed domains for ten years and have seen no difference. I don't use 5-6 dashes - but one or two dashes make no difference.
  
  That said, if I were going to flip a site I'd go for undashed - just because people have read "dashes are bad" somewhere or other (probably written by someone who read it somewhere else).
  
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UBotBuddy 14 years ago

Well if you want to stay away from them then that is okay by me because mine are ranking pretty well.
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EvcRo 14 years ago

so many stupid things in this thread

dog training - Google Search

no1 www.dog-obedience-training-review.com/

4 words, 3 dashes lol. Ive come to the conclusions that google love dashes, the more the better!
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dsmpublishing 14 years ago

Hi guys

my main domain is dashed just because i wanted my company name and it was already taken without dashes.

I've got a really good free ebay ebook that has three dashes in it and it does really well on Google so i cant complain.

kind regards

sam
X
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badboy_Nick 14 years ago

Whenever I cant find the undashed domain I want I use the dashed one. Doesnt make a difference, really. In PPC, it wont make ANY difference at all anyway apart from the increased character length.

Nick
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TelegramSam 14 years ago

Originally Posted by lexilexi

Dashed-domains: Do they suck, after all?

I found that refurbished-vacuum-cleaners.com sucked more than refurbishedvacuumcleaners.com
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Taylor French 14 years ago

I have very easily gotten a domain with two dashes to the top ten for some very choice keywords for the particular niche. It's still there with very few backlinks, and it gets almost 9k unique visits per month. I have sold the site, but the new owner left my analytics code on the site and I can still see the traffic. I tried to contact them to remind them to remove it, but they never did.
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Sara Young 14 years ago

I'll chime in with my experience.

1 dash is always fine.

More than that - I've found them problematic for ranking on Google.

I see others have had different experiences, but that is what I found for my domains.
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mogulmedia 14 years ago

Yeah I'm not sure it makes much difference. Of course the success comes from your promotional activities I think more than the type of domain.

I have had success with both and I am actually starting to like dashed domains more as it seperates the keywords out to make them more obvious and readable to others.
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