Hi
My question regards domain names.
What difference does it make with a hyphenated domain name to google? does it make a lot of difference or not really. any thing else to look out for regarding hyphenated domain names?
example birthdaycake . com vs birthday-cake . com.
Regards
It's better to get a domain without hyphens than with hyphens if you can do it; it's easier for people to say "birthday cake dot com" than it is "birthday hyphen cake dot com". You'll get more direct "type in" traffic and will benefit slightly due it to being easier to say. From an SEO perspective – from what I've read – there doesn't appear to be any benefit either way, but the convention that most people follow is to buy the name without the hyphen, given the choice.
The question becomes more interesting when you can't get the domain for your chosen keyword with your favoured extension (e.g. .com). If you're targetting the US market then .com is the favourite, followed by .net. I'd go for a .net without a hyphen over a hyphenated .com (but haven't done any tests to back this up). A .org domain is the third most powerful. So would you go for available-domain.com or availabledomain.org? Tricky. I'm sure people have tested this pretty heavily (Dan?) but I've not seen the results.
I have heard that if you have more than a couple of hyphens in a domain name that it can have a negative impact on your rankings – many sites with lots of sites are quite spammy so the thinking is that high hyphens raises the likelihood that your site isn't that great. Again, I've nothing solid to back that up. You also want to avoid long domain names in general (I read yesterday 35 characters was an approximate limit – wish I could remember where).
Cheers,
Graham
Most of my domain names are with hyphens.
When you mainly focus on SE traffic - like me - and don't use the domain name offline, hyphens are good, when using them also offline I agree to Graham.
Juergen
Almost always shorter is better. Hyphens or not, shorter is better...
Except when it falls into the Arnold Schwartzenegger category where remembering it means it becomes unforgettable.
Back to the hyphens, if a domain can have ALL hyphens, and has three full words (tested to 5) it will outperform the identical domainnamewithout spaces.
If you have multiple letters the same, then hyphens become really effective
I think there is a readibility score based on letter proximity, but I go for the easier to read any day.Code:filllevel fill-level
If everything has gone in your particualr area, add a short suffix word like tips, blog etc.
There are more advanced techniques but are way outside the scope of the ChallengeCode:fillleveltips | fill-level-tips filllevelblog | fill-level-blog
Last edited by sage; 07-13-2010 at 07:13 AM.
Sage
twitter: @challengesage | | | |
You Deserve To Succeed!Create more value than you capture ~Tim O'Reilly
I always check to see who owns the non-hyphenated names. For example, if kitesurfingfoo.com is a parking page (most likely), I will probably be comfortable going with kitesurfing-foo - knowing it is unlikely that I will run into any competition from the domain. If kitesurfingfoo.com is an active domain with content - for example, a blog, I might consider the .net or .org extension.
I've also worked with some domainers who swear its better to go with non-stopwords - bluekitesurfingfoo.com will rank higher than mykitesurfingfoo.com.
One tip I've learning is to not ignore the inexpensive .info and .biz domains. If you got kitesurfingvideotraining.com, also try to pick up kitesurf.biz. In my techie mode I've set up a WordPress blog running a URL shortener plugin or ez[dot]com domain for custom short URLs. These secondary domains also seem to generate less negative blowback when used in profiles, email addresses and web comment domains.
Phil Barnhart
My Twitter
Phillip,Originally Posted by Phillip Barnhart
What do you mean by "non-stopwords" and why is "bluekitesurfingfoo.com" better ranking than "mykitesurfingfoo.com"?
I would like to know that too. Here's a wiki definition of stop words: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words. I think he means NOT to use words like my, the, that, etc.
Stopwords are like "my" and "the" (and also other common terms such as "best" "blog" and "city" when tacked onto other phrases). In my day job I'm a web developer, and some of the tools I work with include spam filtering software and services, large search filtering products and even Google Search appliance. Since it has become common practice to add stopwords to domains in SEO, there is more and more discussion about negatively weight-listing domains using these words. However, if you use a descriptive unrelated word OR a local word - bluekitesurfing or texaskitesurfing - these remain scoring neutral or even positive.
Phil Barnhart
My Twitter
Good information, thank you.
But the obvious followup question is, how do you know whether a word is considered a "stop" word or not to a search engine? Is there an authoritative list that Google uses? I checked a stop word list that was referenced in the Wikipedia link provided by Sculley. It's very extensive BUT, some of the entries don't appear to me to be problematic. For instance, why are "eleven", "show" and "above" considered "stop" words?
and "computer".I guess we can only speculate what list of stop words Google uses.
Here is another list http://www.ranks.nl/resources/stopwords.html (scroll down for the 2nd and 3rd list). It's from a few years back, so it may be out of date.
Google treats words with a hypen as a single unit in searches. I would avoid hypens in domain, unless the hypen version has more traffic or less/weaker competition and want to focus on the hypen version.
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