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Using hyphens in domain name?

by TBInternetMarketing
17 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Anyone had experience with this?
I.e. makemoneyonline(dot)com vs make-money-online(dot)com

We all know exact domains making ranking easier, but what's the skinny on domains with hyphens?
#domain #hyphens
  • Profile picture of the author InitialEffort
    I wouldn't worry about hyphens too much. Just try not to have free-weight-loss-tips-for-dogs.com

    Just remember that if your exact match is Tips For Dogs.

    Then tipsfordogs.com is a 100% match, where as tips-for-dogs.com has an 85% density, so 11 letters divided by 13 letters.
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    • Profile picture of the author ChrisRWS
      The search engine algorithms are mature enough to understand where they can differentiate words with and without separating symbols, my business partner and I have tried a few experiments in the past and we came to the conclusion that a hyphen does not influence SERPs
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  • Profile picture of the author st271
    It doesn't make any difference rankings wise. I've seen lots of hyphenated domains ranking #1 in Google.
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    • Profile picture of the author TBInternetMarketing
      Thanks for the replies guys. I've also seen sites ranking well using hyphens. I guess what I meant was are they as effective as exact matches? Or would I be better off doing something like 'Howtomakemoneyonline' rather than 'make-money-online'.
      Just curious which one will rank faster?

      Also regarding density, has anyone tried something like 'emakemoneyonline'? This would give you 15/16 density (93%). Or something like 'makemoneyonlinee'? Again 93% but this time with the main keywords in the front, and the 'e' at the end
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      • Profile picture of the author sOliver
        As a rule of thumb:

        non-hyphenated: for brandable names, if you want to do offline advertising
        hyphenated: for seo-purposes if you can't get the other

        If you can get the non-hyphenated version it's always better, but for seo reasons I'd get one with hyphens if necessary
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        • Profile picture of the author martin_boyd
          I have also read numerous reports on this subject, one resource I frequently refer to is niche choppers. They recommend without the hyphens if poss. This is possibly due to the density as described above.

          Will we ever really know?
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          • Profile picture of the author sOliver
            Originally Posted by martin_boyd View Post

            I have also read numerous reports on this subject, one resource I frequently refer to is niche choppers. They recommend without the hyphens if poss. This is possibly due to the density as described above.

            Will we ever really know?
            In fact, search engines know that the hyphen in a domain is actually a space. You could also argue that the SE's are too stupid to read thisisstupid.com, but they are not.

            However, if you buy a domain this--stupid.com then it would say "this -stupid", so the keyword density would be not 100%.
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  • Profile picture of the author MickeyMil
    From my own personal experience having a hyphen in your domain name doesn't matter. The best choice is obviously without hyphens BUT you can still get the the first page with a hyphen without any problems.
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  • Profile picture of the author ButterflyGarden
    I have had slightly better luck ranking sites for keywords using hyphens in phrases but why not buy both if they are both available? Domains are cheap enough.
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  • Profile picture of the author John Williamson
    I've had mixed results - sometimes not ranking at all, somtimes ranking on page 1 easily.
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  • Profile picture of the author DanRMorris
    If it's helpful, I've listed a bunch of hyphenated domain names here that all get tons of traffic everyday: http://lettersfromdan.com/the-hyphen...-name-dilemma/
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  • Profile picture of the author lamandy
    with or without hyphen has no influene in ranking but what matters if your competition and backlinks. if you want really exact match domain, you can use stop search google keywords which will give you a benefit of SEO too
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  • Profile picture of the author Mike McAleer
    I think for branding purposes go with a non hyphenated but for SEO it should not really matter that much. Again product domains that you are trying to maximize for SEO, it should not matter that it is hyphenized
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    • Profile picture of the author TBInternetMarketing
      Thanks for the good feedback guys. I've been using long tail keywords up to now, but just wanted to double check I wasn't missing out on something with the hyphen names. Think long tail is the way to go for now.
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      • Profile picture of the author james7
        Using hypens in domain name is more valuable as it create space between words and match your keyword exactly.
        You can't give the less priority to without hypen domain name, as it may also rank well, if you do good seo work.
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  • Profile picture of the author maryparker
    The general rule of thumb in terms of branding is to not use hyphens between words if possible. When choosing your domain name and deciding on whether to use hyphens you need to consider how the domain name is going to be interpreted and used by other people rather than machines. This makes it easier for people to read and people are less likely to type in a page name as they are a domain name.
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  • Profile picture of the author TycoonRob
    OK, so if we go with the idea that less hyphens are better (whether or not the density comes into play), then if I have a 3 word domain and all .com/.net/.org are taken and I don't want the .info (or maybe a lot of the other extensions are unavailable as well - whatever), then would it matter if I put just one hyphen in there? I wouldn't think so based on this thread.

    For example, I want the domain bigspicerack.com (not really, just an example). But it is taken along with the .net/.org versions. So would it be better to do big-spicerack.com or maybe bigspice-rack.com if those are available? It even gets "worse" if there is a 4 word domain, like bigfatspicerack.com that is taken. So I could do big-fatspicerack.com OR bigfat-spicerack.com OR bigfatspice-rack.com OR big-fat-spicerack.com OR ....you get the idea.

    Obviously if the hyphens didn't really make that much difference then I could put the hyphen(s) in between any words and it would not affect my SE rankings.

    Thoughts?
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