Online Marketing From Home

Should you use hyphens or dashes in a domain name?

I often come across new forum posts where someone is asking whether he or she should hyphenate a domain name. What really irritates me are some of the answers that are posted to these questions…

Answers such as “Don’t use more than two hyphens, maximum three”, or “Don’t use hyphens, they are used by keyword spammers”. What rubbish!

There are two issues to consider as far as hyphens are concerned, namely:
1. SEO or Search Engine Optimization, and
2. Natural Search Queries (done by people like you and me)

1. Hyphens and SEO

Does Google penalize sites using hyphens or dashes in their domain name or url?

This is what Matt Cutts of Google has to say on this topic:

Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url. Of course I can only speak for Google, not other search engines. And bear in mind that if your domain looks like buy-cheap-viagra-online-while-consolidating-your-debt-so-you-can-play-texas-holdem-while-watching-porn.com, that may still attract attention for other reasons.
Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

I have not been able to find any evidence supporting the theory that hyphens should be limited to say one or two, or three at the most.

Will hyphens in a domain name help you to rank better in the search engines?

There is no evidence to suggest that, all else being equal, a site with a domain name such as “online-marketing.com” will rank higher than “onlinemarketing.com” for the keywords online marketing.

Hyphens are first and foremost word separators. Google has no problem identifying “onlinemarketing” as “online” and “marketing”.

There may be some phrases that should rather be hyphenated in order to avoid possible confusion, such as “booksexchange” – Is it “books exchange” or “book sex change”?

Not using a hyphen means a search engines will have to segment the phrase. Google uses a very advanced algorithm and should normally not have any problems segmenting words and phrases. However, the same cannot be assumed for all search engines…

Should hyphens be used in the “path” of a domain name?

Note: Everything after the slash (/) is called a path. For example, in mysite.com/example/ the path is example.

Well, this is an easy question to answer.

Matt Cutts of Google was a guest speaker at the WordCamp 2007 Conference (held in San Francisco) and delivered a presentation entitled “Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers”.

According to Matt, using dashes or hyphens are certainly preferable to using underscores or no spaces.

Once again, Google may not necessarily have a problem segmenting phrases but other search engines may have some trouble. However, Matt also pointed out that there is no need to make changes to existing paths although he recommended using hyphens for new paths.

For further information, refer to:
http://2007.wordcamp.org/schedule/search-engine-optimization/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/

2. Natural Search Queries
 
If we forget about search engines and SEO for a moment there are many arguments for and against using hyphens in domain names.

Arguments against using hyphens

a. It looks unprofessional
 
It is all in the eye of the beholder!

Some people may think that onlinemarketingromhome.com looks better than online-marketing-from-home.com… I don’t agree, but that is only my view. I don’t think there is really a right or wrong answer here.

b. People do not like to type in hyphens

This is a good argument. When I hear about a new website, I automatically type it as a one word .com url. Even if I know it has hyphens I may still forget to insert them.

Most people will assume that a domain name contains no hyphens. If you have a hyphenated domain name you may end up sending a lot of traffic to your competitor that owns the same domain name without hyphens!

c. It makes the domain name longer

True, but as far as I am concerned, it is neither here nor there. Not a very strong argument.

d. Makes the domain name more complicated

I often have some trouble explaining to people over the phone what a hyphen or dash sign looks like. Some people will use an underscore (_) or even a slash (/) since they may not be that familiar with the term. (Not something most people use on a daily basis)

It is much easier to say “it is one word…”

Arguments in favor of using hyphens

Excluding any SEO arguments, the only real advantage to using a hyphenated domain name is that it looks better, i.e. more visually appealing or recognizable.

This is especially true in the case of long domain names or when words in certain phrases start and end with the same letters, for example:

article-encyclopedia.com looks better than articleencyclopedia.com
make-money-working-on-the-internet.com looks better than makemoneyworkingontheinternet.com

Decisions on whether or not to use hyphenated domain names should be taken on a case by case basis. It is ridiculous to make a blanket statement such as “avoid hyphenating domain names”, or “hyphenated domain names are better for SEO”. 

As a matter of interest, I own online-marketing-from-home.com and onlinemarketingfromhome.com. It was not easy to decide on what version to use!

In the end I felt online-marketing-from-home.com was the right choice and I am using onlinemarketingfromhome.com as a redirect, so it does not really matter what version people type into their browsers, they will still end up on my blog.

To be totally honest, if I could not have obtained onlinemarketingfromhome.com I would not have even considered registering and using online-marketing-from-home.com.

My advice is to always try to register both versions (with and without hyphens) of a domain name, especially a keyword rich domain name that you have long-term plans for.

All the best,
Francois du Toit

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 5:41 pm and is filed under Domain Names, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.