hyphen woes

[julian]

Today I asked a company who were trying to sell me advertising out of interest why they set their whole site up and used:

KEYWORD-surrey.co.uk instead of KEYWORDsurrey.co.uk (which is just parked @ 1&1)

I thought this was very strange so I asked why - the reply I had was:

The URL format was a conscious decision by our marketing experts because KEYWORD is our primary brand, which we will establish and port to other areas in time.

So their basing this hyphen as an advantage for people searching for KEYWORD in Google?

Doesn't seem logical or right to me..

 

[julian]

the keyword is very short and easy to read e.g. EATsurrey.co.uk (EAT is the 'brand'

I can't believe it would be found in serps without qualifying it with the place name.

Anyway why are we wasting our lives on this

 

[BeachLife]

The URL format was a conscious decision by our marketing experts because KEYWORD is our primary brand, which we will establish and port to other areas in time.

So they are saying they are trading from brandname-surrey.co.uk now, but will expand to brandname-sussex.co.uk and brandname-kent.co.uk later.

Not having the non-hyphenated version redirecting to the hyphenated is an obvious fail. Otherwise though? 10 years ago "experts" would have told them that using a hyphen is preferable to not, and that having a geographical component in the url may help them for local searches. 5 years ago "experts" would have told them that having a keyword in the domain would help them for keyword searches.

So their basing this hyphen as an advantage for people searching for KEYWORD in Google?

Doesn't seem logical or right to me..

The only thing logical or right is to ignore experts with regard to domains and searching. Google keeps moving the goalposts and expert opinions from not long ago can first look odd, then downright wrong.

I can't help but see parallels between hyphenated domains .co.uk from ten or 15 years ago and .uk domains now. Then people might not bother registering the non-hyphenated domains, thinking no one would trade on it, only to hand over substantial coin some years later to the domain investor that had registered it in the meantime. Now I can see businesses registering the .co.uk and not bothering to register the .uk, as who would trade on it? Fast forward some years and find the .uk having been registered by someone again, who wants a high price to hand it over. I think Monkey might have expressed something similar.

Heyho, it's a slow day.

 

[denchomsky]

Surely just better to buy the brand name (if possible) then use sub-domains or sub-folders?