Using hyphens in domain name?

15 years ago

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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ChrisRWS 15 years ago

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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st271

15 years ago

It doesn't make any difference rankings wise. I've seen lots of hyphenated domains ranking #1 in Google.

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TBInternetMarketing

15 years ago

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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sOliver

15 years ago

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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martin_boyd

15 years ago

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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sOliver

15 years ago

Originally Posted by 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?

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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MickeyMil

15 years ago

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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ButterflyGarden

15 years ago

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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John Williamson

15 years ago

I've had mixed results - sometimes not ranking at all, somtimes ranking on page 1 easily.

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DanRMorris

15 years ago

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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lamandy

15 years ago

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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Mike McAleer

15 years ago

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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TBInternetMarketing 15 years ago

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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- james7 15 years ago
  
  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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maryparker

15 years ago

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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TycoonRob

15 years ago

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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Using hyphens in domain name?

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