hyphens in domain names? pros? cons?
 

Who knows about this?

Do hyphens in domain names hurt? Help? Worthless or what?

no benefits and makes the domain worth fraction of the non hyphen version... :2 cents:

Less CTR aswell

I would agree with this too.

hyphen domains are almost always "not preferred" let's say. unless you got something like, a-z.com I'll take that off your hands if you don't want it.

thanks...

I had an idea for a hyphenated domain, and I still might proceed with it.

I had no choice but to go with a hyphenated domain. But in our case, it made not one iota of difference. :)

pros - you can buy them for $10
cons - everything else.

sure it did. How do you know how much more traffic you would have gotten without the hyphen? It is just common sense that at least a couple type ins (if not a lot) for your domain were lost because someone remembered the name but forgot to put in the hyphen.


I think the hyphen can be similar to a .net for branding purposes. If they are not paying attention they will go to the wrong site (.com instead of .net in this example).

If you are not looking to brand anything then it doesn't matter if you have a hyphen, for branding purposes at least.

Why not just own both? hypen and non-hyphen?

Staring at those few words can make your brain explode :1orglaugh

Maybe the non has already gone.

the non-hyphen... err. is gone.

Hey Chris, do both and test.

It's been a couple of years, but I tested a couple of two-word domain pairs for which I own the hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions. The non-hyphenated got more type-ins, but the hyphenated got (much) better search rankings.

I wouldn't hyphenate more than three words, however, to avoid a penalty, i.e. keyword spammed names like www.free-teen-cheerleader-porno-videos.com are right out.

Hope this helps :2 cents:

Doesnt hurt you at all for SEO but for value down the road it sucks. But if you don't care about that go for it.

i've ranked well with both; hypen and non hypen versions of the domain

I have a hyphenated domain I'm about to SEO for the obvious keyword. Let's see how It does, I ofc would have loved to have this one without the hyphen though lol. Teen-Boobs.com

No, it didn't. Our situation is 100% different. We lost no type ins. Her fans go out of their way to look for her. If they type it in and get nothing...they google it. So we never lost those people doing the type-ins. Not even one. Nobody who went to the trouble to do that type in would then quit that easily. But most just use google instead of their address bar anyway. Didn't affect us one tiny bit. Claudia-Marie.Com has been the number one alexa rated big tit solo girl site since the 1st month it went online. :)

Interesting. So one can expect good SE placement even with hyphens in the domains and yet people seem to think that this isn't valuable down the road?

Obviously not having the hyphen is better, but if you're getting great SE placement with the hyphen, how can that diminish the value of the domain?

One can expect better placement from the hyphenated version.

Remember, SE's use hyphens as word space designators. The SE "knows" that "keyword1-keyword2.com" is composed of two keywords. When it sees "keyword1keyword2.com" it doesn't "know" where the break is -- although it may be able to "guess" -- but it will rank what it knows much higher than what it guesses.

For example, does "bitemeat.com" = "Bite Meat dot com" OR "Bite Me At dot com"?

You just need to have both versions, ie. Claudia-Marie and ClaudiaMarie > both redirect to the same site, but submit the first version to SE's etc. and just call the site "Claudia Marie" -- anyone trying to type in will get it right.

I have a hyphenated domain that got great SE Placement with almost no SEO. I parked it because it wasn't making me money. Lost the SE placement. I just rearranged the sponsors and placed PPC ads and I'm putting it back up. We'll see if it gets its place back. I'll let you know.

:1orglaugh Robbie, I would have given you the benefit of the doubt that maybe it didn't affect you that much for reasons stated but to say not one person makes you look like a noob. Sure some people who typed it in by mistake and went to the wrong site then went to google and searched for it, but you don't know what everyone in the world is doing or has done. There is doubt that some people went to the wrong url and then didn't go to google. to think otherwise is just insane. no one person hun? :upsidedow crazy.

you obviously missed the part about branding and lost type ins. If you are not going to brand the site and it will be some cheesy blog or something like that then by all means use hyphens. The most important reason NOT to use a hyphen is because it is hard to remember and therefore you will lose type in traffic.

If you going to try to build a brand, and create a website that will be talked about etc... then you would be crazy (in 99% of the cases) to use dot net or hyphen domains.

The way to look at hyphen domains is that for the same price, you can get a much better term in the domain than you would for a non-hyphened - essentially the same way you'd look at a .net or .org vs. .com. Given that and given they don't seem to hurt SEO much if at all, developers looking primarily to SEO whatever they get as their main source of traffic love hyphen domains.

For a professional biz, you should almost always get an unhyphened .com, and honestly if you're serious about it, you should buy a better one on the secondary market vs. registering, even if it's a couple g's or more. It's more than worth it to set yourself apart from the crowd plus you're not stuck with a brand new name that Google wouldn't be too fond of. For throwing up minisites/blogs/etc. that aren't your primary business and utilizing SEO, then hyphen domains are worth looking at IMO to get the better term in the domain for the price.

No difference??? Don't be ridiculous...

It may not make as much of a difference since there's nothing on www.claudiamarie.com and you have 1st place rankings for "claudia marie" "claudiamarie" / etc - but it still makes a faint difference for the numb nuts that type in "claudiamarie.com" into their address bar and are confused at the result.

Did you try contacting the owner of claudiamarie.com? If they got smart instead of doing shitall with the domain they'd set it up as a landing page...

I vote for NON-hyphenated; but, per DN Journal a couple of weeks ago, www.Cloud-Computing.de sold for $38,240. Pretty darn good price, especially with the Hyphen AND the "de" TLD.

All of my 49 cloud-related domains are non-hyphenated dot COMs, i.e.,:

Cloud-Related Domains, (Updated as of 9/10/10)

CLOUDUSING.COM
CLOUDCALCULATING.COM
CLOUDCALCULATIONS.COM
CLOUDRESPONSES.COM
CLOUDCOMPUTINGSPEED.COM
CLOUDDOWNLOADING.COM
CLOUDGRIDCOMPUTING.COM
CLOUDSPEEDCOMPUTERS.COM
CLOUDSPEEDCOMPUTING.COM
CLOUDSPEEDDOWNLOADS.COM
CLOUDSPEEDCOMPUTATIONS.COM
FREECLOUDCOMPUTATIONS.COM
CLOUDCOMPUTERSPEED.COM
INTERNETCLOUDUSE.COM
WEBCLOUDUSES.COM
INTERNETCLOUDUSES.COM
FREECLOUDUSE.COM
WEBCLOUDUSE.COM
PRIVATECLOUDPROCESSING.COM
PRIVATECLOUDSCOMPUTING.COM
FREECLOUDPROCESSING.COM
CLOUDPROCESSINGDATA.COM
DATACLOUDPROCESSING.COM
FREECLOUDUSAGE.COM
ACCOUNTINGCLOUDS.COM
RESEARCHDATACLOUD.COM
DEFENSECONTRACTORCLOUD.COM
CONTRACTCLOUDS.COM
VENDORCLOUDS.COM
CLOUDBUSINESSPROCESSING.COM
FREEBUSINESSCLOUD.COM
BUSINESSCLOUDUSEAGE.COM
CLOUDBUSINESSUSE.COM
BUSINESSCLOUDUSE.COM
MEDICALCLOUDUSE.COM
LAWENFORCEMENTCLOUD.COM
TRAVELCLOUDUSE.COM
MEETINGCLOUDUSE.COM
SEARCHENGINECLOUD.COM
INFORMATIONCLOUDUSE.COM
CLOUDCOMPUTINGUSE.COM
FREECLOUDCOMPUTINGUSE.COM
FREECLOUDUSING.COM
CLOUDUPLOADING.COM
DOWNLOADINGCLOUD.COM
CLOUDMOBILEDOWNLOAD.COM
MOBILECLOUDDOWNLOAD.COM
DOWNLOADINGCLOUDS.COM
UPLOADINGCLOUDS.COM

EC, in my experience it depends on how you are seeking traffic. If you are driving traffic to a given domain you could have a domain like "XXXXXXXXX dot com", which has nothing to do with the subject with which the domain name is concerned. In other words, your domain name could well indicate that you have a site, the domain name of which concerns "basketball" but the site is really about "grape jelly".

Keywords properly placed and the use of either manual or automated methods of focussing traffic to that site make all the difference in the world! This will even work with Google search results if you do it right.

Waiting for SERPS though can outlive you. We can no longer be hyenas looking to scavenge. We must go out and kill something if we are to eat!

My $.02.

Thanks for looking and thanks for the chat!

Sally.

http://i394.photobucket.com/albums/p...081007_ssh.jpg

English speaking people prefer non-hyphen over hyphen any day.

Germans though, absolute opposite.. Even in English language domains they would most likely try hyphen first, since they are more used to that...

I have a couple and they list okay in search engines, and agree that you should not use more then 3 words. In the past spammers would use hyphen domains but now it seems many are legit websites.

Jesus Christ what the FUCK did you just say?! :uhoh ... horrible examples :disgust ... basketball to grape jelly? :uhoh

I think what you mean to say is if you are branding something obscure (google.com) you're better off without hyphens. But if your domain name is specific to your business: big-teen-boobs.com then hyphens gain SE advantages (which are still outweighed overall to non-hyphen domains in my opinion)

exaclty, he can have said he was only losing 1% of his traffic i wouldn't have replied but to say he has NEVER lost 1 person because he has a hyphen domain is just insane.

What happens if the person who owns claudiamarie.com decides to make it a middle age big tit women's site and puts really good content on it, then I bet he would be losing a lot more than he is now.

I think that I fucken said what I meant! I didn't even mention hyphens. Realizing that I just blew your poor-Google-infected mind, I suggest to you that you go back and READ what I wrote! And you get to be just as disgusted as you like; I don't care! I'm not some co-dependent, drug-addicted, alcoholic housewife who doesn't say what she means and doesn't mean what says! This is BUSINESS and has nothing to do with your personal preferences, however sensitive you may be. so go GFY!

You want to earn, you need to get out there and actively beat the bushes, knock doors and sometimes kick in a few.

If you want to foreever be on your knees sucking the dick of The Great God Google, be my guest!

You want to know how to generate traffic, I can tell you but I am beginning to believe that the COLLECTIVE IQ around here is far too low to bother with!

Prove me wroing, please, as I like this place!

Sally.

Jesus Christ you are one psycho bitch!!! Get back on your medication :uhoh ...

The BasketBall to Grape Jelly of domain marketing https://gfy.com/image.php?u=99505&dateline=1283543697 :thumbsup

I think he was on coke or something when he said that not ONE single person was ever mis-directed in the history of claudia-marie.com vs. claudiamarie.com :1orglaugh ... :uhoh

Okay - I read your horribly crafted original post 6 times over and besides your horrible wording and horrible example (jelly to basketball) I finally see what you're saying, and it makes you appear even more stupid. :disgust

To say that a domain name's relevance to your topic means absolutely nothing is ridiculous. :disgust

You don't *HAVE* to have a relevant domain name to your topic - but to suggest that i-am-a-stupid-cunt-with-a-yeast-infection.com is just as good for a website about cars as CARS.COM (or that the domain name basketball.com is just as good for a site about grapejelly as opposed to grapejelly.com :uhoh ) is ridiculous. Actually only a psychotic cunt would ever suggest something so absurd.

depends on what you are referring Evil Chris....

it has no impact to SEO...

.

They aren't popular.

SE's don't need hyphens in domains to work out the words in a domain. and all things being equal a non hyphenated domain will rank better than a hyphenated one.

:thumbsup:thumbsup

I have over 100 domains and 30% are hyphenated and traffic wise some perform better is SE's dont ask me why and as far as customer readability if your going for SE rankings there is NO DIFFERENCE. I did my research in Mainstream marketing to find that out.. and a customer will click on a google result either way.