Does hyphen kill this domain?

by 6 replies
7
Picked up a drop a while back that I am pondering.. according to Keyword Planner this two word phrase gets:

246,000 global monthly exact
110,000 US monthly exact

The domain is not region specific and can apply globally. It is lucrative but _probably_ very competitive. It is an exact match two word .com and plural..
However it has a hyphen.. i.e. blue-widgets.com

I also own (for a while now) the .org non plural non hyphen variation.. i.e bluewidget.org
which receives 201,000/49,500 global/US monthly exact.

I would rather sit on the domain than sell it.. for now if its too hard to go forward with it

Thoughts? Thx
#search engine optimization #domain #hyphen #kill
  • One of my domain names has a hyphen in it and it ranks pretty well. As long as you don't have a 10 word phrase and use hyphens to connect the words, I believe you won't have a problem.
  • I had two hyphen domains, infact iv still got them and they are for sale, the two i got are the most popular in their niche, when i had them online both were rank one for their respected keywords, and at the time it was pretty much simple to wipe out the competition.

    I think keyworded domains used to rank very well just because of the keywords, unsure how this plays out today.

    Incidently, if anyone wants to purchase these domains let me know.

    Sites are:

    add-link .co.uk
    add-link .com

    Most sort after keywords in relation to link directories, the .com expires in 2020, and the .com is 16 years old which obviously adds to weight of the .com. I was using keyword urls, so you could create thousands of categories like cars, books, so when people type in add link books, looking for links for books, it used to bring us top, hence they were pretty good domains. So basically, add link keyword on all urls.

    If you check the .com past history, it used to be ranked 70,000 Alexa in the world before i ditched it to work full time on my gaming site. Let me know if anyone is interested.

    Alex
  • I try to avoid hyphens when buying domain names, but they're perfectly fine to develop sites. They're treated like spaces, so they may even clarify to the search engines your intended keywords.
  • There are many high ranking sites with hyphen, it will not affect your website ranking.
  • Try as much as you can to find a domain name without hyphens. I'm not entirely against the use of hyphens in a domain name, but it's hard to memorize (my thought). In the long run, it may reduce the number direct traffic to your website.

    Use hyphens only as a last resort.
  • Hyphens won't hurt your rankings if you have good content. I originally tried to get the non-hyphenated version of my site dot com but the owner is squatting on it and wants 5 figures for it.

    I created the hyphenated dot come version and rank just fine. From time to time I approach the owner with a purchase request, not sure I'll ever get to buy it for a low cost, but at this point, the only thing I would do with the non-hyphenated version would 301 it to my site.

    -CG
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