hyphens in domain names

[Mike Seddon]

I've just been reading an interesting post on webproworld where someone was asking about the value (positive or negative) of using hyphens in domains names for SEO purposes.

For example, if your market is selling wine glasses which of the following domains would represent the better deal

www.wineglasses or
www.wine-glasses

Any thoughts/comments?

[sally]

Hi Mike

Just my totally uneducated thoughts. Surely site content is most important, if I google "wine glasses" it is going to bring up the sites with the best content (according to google) and that site might have the domain name glasswares.com.

Whether google gives higher rank to a site without the hyphen I don't know but surely that can only be a small part of how they rank a site, so good content on the hyphenated domain site would beat the non hyphenated if they had poor content.

Sorry I'm waffling now.

All that said, I do wish I had chosen a different domain name whan I set up

[RedEvo]

Some thoughts on the subject here.

d

[Alvin]

Not to sure on this one.I have been using hyphenated domain names on the grounds that a space makes it more readable to the SE's.

In URL extensions I think Matt Cutts stated that hyphens had an advantage.

Not so sure that content is king anymore.I suspect its more to do with having the right words in the right places.

Domain name choice has become a major factor in high rankings in recent times.

Alvin

[Mike Seddon]

Some thoughts on the subject here.

d

Good link and a well put together article. His conclusions make a lot of sense to me.

[Indizine]

according to samurai it does seem to be able to read the words individually in the url with regards seo value, wth and without hyphens.

[Mike Seddon]

Not to sure on this one.I have been using hyphenated domain names on the grounds that a space makes it more readable to the SE's.

In URL extensions I think Matt Cutts stated that hyphens had an advantage.

Not so sure that content is king anymore.I suspect its more to do with having the right words in the right places.

Domain name choice has become a major factor in high rankings in recent times.

Alvin

I hadn't heard that Matt said that - that's good to know.

I tend to use hyphens in the url extensions as a habit I got into just because it made it easier for me to read what the page was about!

[Greg Findley]

www.wineglasses or
www.wine-glasses

Any thoughts/comments?

I personally believe the non hyphened version is the better domain name as search engines are smart enough to separate common words in a domain name. The non hyphen version would also be more valuable as an asset with the site in terms of domain values in the majority of cases.

Obviously where a hyphen should be used it makes sense, eg. businesssense is hard to read and could be confusing, where as business-sense is clear.

[Alvin]

I hadn't heard that Matt said that - that's good to know.

I tend to use hyphens in the url extensions as a habit I got into just because it made it easier for me to read what the page was about!

a bit from Matt here not the video I saw where he said there was a benefit to having hyphens in URL extensions.I will try to find it.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

Alvin

[awebapart]

I've just been reading an interesting post on webproworld where someone was asking about the value (positive or negative) of using hyphens in domains names for SEO purposes.

For example, if your market is selling wine glasses which of the following domains would represent the better deal

www.wineglasses or
www.wine-glasses

We conducted some quite comprehensive SEO experiment tests on keyword domains and inbound linking a few months ago, and although these test are still ongoing, I can say that early results are quite surprising, not what you would expect, not what you think would make sense, and certainly different to what you read from a lot of SEO discussion.

IMO, there is currently a slight Google SEO advantage, inbound link-wise, of having hyphenated keyword domains. To give people a hint as to why, whilst our experiments were much more complex and comprehensive, we eventually realised there is a simple mini experiment you can conduct which goes some way to illustrate the main issue:

1. www.bravedoctors.com
2. www.beige-asteroids.com
(these websites don't exist but that doesn't really matter)

Wait for google to reindex this page in a few hours time, maybe tomorrow, then see what words google manages to pick up on this page.

Will google pick up:

a. the joined words (word1word2) in the first domain? (prediction: Yes)
b. the joined words (word1-word2) in the second domain? (prediction: Yes)
c. the separate words (word1 word2) in the first domain? (prediction: No)
d. the separate words (word1 word2) in the second domain? (prediction: Yes)

It is result c which is the surprising one.

To check the joined words run this search, but change the words wine glasses for the words in the domains.

To check the separate words run this search, but change the words wine glasses for the words in the domains.

In order to not spoil this mini experiment please do not mention the words in the 2 test domains on this thread, and please do not post any links to google searches with those words in them. Otherwise the experiment will be tainted and will fail since we cannot perform the experiment if those words are mentioned elsewhere in the thread. This experiment might still fail, that's the beauty and excitement of experiments, you never know for sure.

You may think that this experiment proves little, in that it only shows what words are picked up by google on a page with a link, not the actual site in question, but if google cannot pick up the words in the link on this page it has little chance of transferring inbound link word relevance to the site, and our more comprehensive experiments support this. At the very least it should prove that google isn't as smart as some people think it is.