Which is better....?

[suzi]

For a product domain, which is better, mainly from a serps point of view, but to a lesser extent from a buyer's view too:

A) A 2 word .org.uk

or

B) A 2 word hyphenated .co.uk

As ever, all thoughts appreciated!

Suzi

 

[retired_member13]

http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/domai...901-hyphenated-co-uk-unhyphenated-org-uk.html

 

[kendalcottages]

Generally-speaking, I think I'd go for the hyphenated .co.uk

 

[suzi]

Thanks Ty - that goes a long way towards answering my question, although I'd still be interested to hear people's views on which of these are likely to get better search listings, all other things being equal (ie 2 otherwise identical sites).

word1-word2.co.uk

or

word1word2.org.uk


Hasn't anyone ever tested this?

 

[expertc]

Thanks Ty - that goes a long way towards answering my question, although I'd still be interested to hear people's views on which of these are likely to get better search listings, all other things being equal (ie 2 otherwise identical sites).

word1-word2.co.uk

or

word1word2.org.uk


Hasn't anyone ever tested this?

Tested but with industrial B2B sites. .co.uk gets better results in SERP when PR is equal to org.uk. I would say co.uk and org.uk have about 0.5 point difference e.g. to get to the same position as PR2 .co.uk, org.uk should be PR2.5. hyphenated or not - doesn't make a difference at all. In some cases hyphen is even better as keywords are separated and couldn't be messed by SE.

 

[crabfoot]

In some cases hyphen is even better as keywords are separated and couldn't be messed by SE.

Got to echo that - sometimes you can see trouble when word1word2 could be parsed wrongly.

Obviously, a hyphen can muck up the word flow of announcers doing voiceovers on radio and TV ads - but assuming you can get BOTH domains easily, you can redirect the unhyphenated name to the hyphenated active domain - the National Lottery do that, and it works fine.

My real contribution to this thread is to suggest that you could use a subdomain - if word2. co.uk is available, you can pay the extra few bob a month to the host for subdomains, and go with word1 DOT word2 .

The lower pages on subdomains are often ignored by the bots, but not completely (they don't ignore pages that get regular hits) - and they will index the top page of a subdomain if it is sufficiently interesting. Whatever, you can link back to word2. co.uk and put the "meat" of the site on there, and it will be indexed properly.

Not a solution to every situation - but it might work for you.