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Dashes in url or domain names

by ThomasOMalley
8 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Do dashes or hyphens in a url affect Google rankings negatively?

An example would be www.toronto-pickeringmaidservices.com.
#dashes #domain #names #url
  • Profile picture of the author patco
    In your situation, maybe yes, because the domain name is long.. I would choose without any symbols (especially if the domain name is under 15 characters!)
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  • Profile picture of the author alvinchua91
    It doesn't affect SEO much, but most people are not used to having hyphens in the main domain name so if you want people to recall your website it might be a little bit harder.
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  • Profile picture of the author sirajkhattak
    Not really but if you have used more than one , and the search engines prefer the short name domains, so try to keep it normal and simple.
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  • Profile picture of the author quadagon
    Google views both in different ways.

    The - is seen as a seperator so each word is treat as a separate word. So toronto-pickering-maid-service would be indexed as Toronto pickering maid service.

    If your site is toronto_pickering_maid_service google would see it as toronotopickeringmaidservice.

    So there is a difference. Now personally i would try and avoid both as searchers dont include them. I subscribe to the optamise for people not bots.
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  • Profile picture of the author Daaria
    Here is a video explaining it
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  • Profile picture of the author izwan
    Matt Cutts said :

    “If you are going to make a site and you’re starting fresh, so you’ve got a blank slate to work with, I would probably go ahead and go with dashes. I would continue to go with dashes at lease for the foreseeable future.”

    “Nobody’s slated to be working on that so at least for the time being it’s better to use the dash.”
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