hyphen in a domain name????

[retired_member32]

if i buy a domain with a hyphen in does it affect search engine criteria.

www.big-fish.co.uk
www.bigfish.co.uk

all the domains i am after are taken and the only way round this is to add hyphens,does anybody know the effects

 

[ScottJ]

No benefit having the hyphen for seo nowadays so either or, if your only plan is to generate traffic through organic listings then having a hyphen is fine - if you plan to promote offline/word of mouth etc you risk losing traffic to the non-hyphen.

 

[retired_member32]

thanks i will try it.............:-D

 

[rjs_essex]

Thread Moved > Search Engine Optimisation

Rich

 

[mit]

Yes, that's not so much important having hypens in Domain name, but yes, getting keywords in your domain name would be useful for good SERPs.

 

[jrowlinson]

About 6 months ago we had a debate about this and started using hyphens in our urls. Matt Cutts kind of eludes to this in his blog (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/) and I think it removes any confusion on words that don't combine correctly like (say) 'sexpress' where it might mean 's-express'. A lot of big sites with big seo budgets use hyphens and it seemed an easy decision to make.

In a URL I guess it's kind of the same although we would never use a hypen in a URL.

 

[archibel]

My own experience is that all things being equal search engines seem to place a higher value on non-hyphenated domain names. Obviously this is very difficult to prove because so many factors affect the search ranking.

However, I often use feeder sites to drive traffic to main websites...and consistently seem to have more SEO success with non-hyphenated names (unless the domain phrase I'm using is really obscure e.g. rubber-donkey).

 

[Arleigh]

I agreed that using hyphen is not much important in domain name. Some sites use it to make their URL more readable by their visitors. But using keywords in domain would definitely help your site to be more search-engine friendly...

 

[toronto-seo]

About 6 months ago we had a debate about this and started using hyphens in our urls. Matt Cutts kind of eludes to this in his blog (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/) and I think it removes any confusion on words that don't combine correctly like (say) 'sexpress' where it might mean 's-express'. A lot of big sites with big seo budgets use hyphens and it seemed an easy decision to make.

That is an old post Goolge now can equally handles underscores and dashes (underscores do not apply to domains), when it comes to domain there is almost no difference but I will go for no dashes, it looks that Goolge started to use more than 2 dashes in the domain as a spam signal.

 

[Arleigh]

Google still recommends hyphens to be used instead of underscore in URL.

Kindly see this link:
How can I create a Google-friendly URL structure?

That is an old post Goolge now can equally handles underscores and dashes (underscores do not apply to domains), when it comes to domain there is almost no difference but I will go for no dashes, it looks that Goolge started to use more than 2 dashes in the domain as a spam signal.

 

[toronto-seo]

Google webmasters guidlines is the offecial Google documntation they dont update it untill they are 100% sure about their poleciy, paid link is an example for that .. they have been telling people that it is against their TOS but the webmasters guidlines offecila page did not clealry said until the end of last year.