The Real Truth About Hyphens in Domain Names

I was wondering about this topic ever since I saw it mentioned in an email I received a feww days ago. I have a personal interest in the topic because I have a number of hyphenated domain names and wondered how this would affect their search engine placement. Well, sure enough my trusty Internet Marketing Newsletter from Michael Campbell arrived a couple of days ago and he had part of the newletter devoted to answering my question? I am still going to do a bit more reasearch before I totally ditch my hyphenated domains ( always a sceptic ) but there is some very good advise in this newslaetter excerpt from this very learned internet marketer and we would all be wise to heed his words..

I know I plan to .

As always enjoy !

Michael Campbell wrote:

There's been a lot of debate over hyphens in domain names of
late. So after all the hype, speculation, and reading several
"advanced" publications on the matter, all it takes is a
simple test.

Go to Google and search for very competitive phrases. Choose
categories that affiliates are known to battle over. The results
are clear. (Even my hypothesis that old hyphenated domains -
pre long domain era - would be "grandfathered in" was wrong.)

The first test search had just one occurrence of a hyphenated
domain name in the top 20 results. It was way down in the 17th
spot. Second try revealed no hyphenated domains in the top
twenty results. Third try, only one in 14th spot.

The test was repeated several more times only to reveal
similar results. Only on my eighteenth attempt, did I finally
find a hyphenated domain name in a top five spot.

I can hear you saying... "But what about non competitive
phrases?" Ok, lets take something simple like, "sourdough
bread." There's only one PPC ad for the phrase, so it's not
exactly a hotly contested category.

Again the results were clear. No domains names with two or
three hyphens were found. And only one domain name with a
single hyphen made it into the top 20 results. It was in 19th
spot. Not exactly where you want to be if you're relying on
search engine traffic. More tests revealed similar results.

Here's a few interesting things to note. In all of my searches,
there was not a single occurrence of any domain name with
more than one hyphen. And in competitive categories, an
average 60% of domain names don't have any keywords in
the domain name itself.

Where I did see keywords that matched the search string
was in the url for the page. This makes it appear that naming
subdirectories with single keywords (without hyphens) is back
in vogue on Google... at least for the moment.

www.mysite.com/baking/breads/sourdough.html

At the heart of the controversy, you may have heard that a
Google spokesperson said, "Google doesn't penalize for hyphens
in domain names." But before you consider the validity, check
when the statement was made, for as you know, the search
engines are constantly changing. What was true last month may
be a thing of the past.

(You can also read between the lines, putting a different
spin on the same words... they don't "penalize" hyphenated
domains... but they don't give them as much "weight" either,
meaning they are less likely to show up in the results.)

If you ask me, it's mostly the spamfiliates and portal
builders that register domains with more than one hyphen.
Regular sites prefer something short, simple and memorable.

The reason why portal builders prefer hyphenated domains, is
because they are 15% more likely to get clicked on. It's easier
for the human eye to pick out keywords in domains when
scanning the results page. (But that's not going to help if
hyphenated domains are not showing up at all. ;-)

Also, in earlier SEO days, the hyphenated domains performed a
little better in search results. The hyphen acted like a delimiter
separating the keywords. But these days, search engines can
easily "pick out" the search phrase from any long convoluted
string of text.

Again, all it takes is a simple test. Go to Google and type in
any phrase like "sourdough bread" and you'll see pages like
this one.

www.mysite.com/whatissourdoughfaqs.html

The word sourdough is shown in bold and the rest of the url is
not. So let's put that one to rest... Google can easily detect
and extract search terms from within a string of text.

So in conclusion, here's a few things to consider at this time.

1) Stay away from hyphenated domain names.

2) Register any new names for at least three years.

3) Build your content and incoming links slowly.

4) Use articles to build valuable content over time.

5) Don't use articles requiring a backlink to the author.

6) Organize content using keywords in subdirectories.

7) Keywords in the domain name are not required.

8) Avoid variables like question marks in your url.

9) Use absolute urls if you want to pass PageRank.

10) Get incoming links from pages on related topics.

Follow these 10 tips and you'll be well on your way to the top
of the search engines. Then sprinkle on the linking strategies
from Revenge of the Mininet, add content and traffic from from
the Article Underground, and you'll be virtually unstoppable.

So what's stopping you?

- - - - -

Michael Campbell

President & CEO Dynamic Media Corporation
4644 Lancelot Court Richmond BC Canada V7C 4S2
Providing successful marketing strategies since 1988.

Author of....
Revenge of the Mininet
Nothing but 'Net