Hyphen-Phobia

[options]

Many people are tempted to kill the name whenever they see a hyphen in it.
Are they right?

Mostly, it depends on which way you will market your site.
If you think of radio or telephone (?) then a hyphen is a bad thing.
Difficult to explain and for someone a bit off-sight for typing in.
Now, ask yourself how many times you input a name in that way and
who and what type of companies have such ads.
Yes, big ones, who already explored all other advertising means.

Today more then 90% of all traffic comes from search engines and links
on other pages.
For a link hyphen is not important, is it for a SE?
Sure, but in a positive way.

First, there is a myth among other ones, that the name, including its extension,
is the most important thing on an internet site.
There are thousands of First Class sites with revenue in $millions having
really bad names.
Some intentionally choose a non-generic senseless "brand" name in order
to trademark it and protect their legal rights.

However for others good name is a compensation for lack of other means
so a neat name is obvious choice, it is also memorable, in case someone lose it somehow.
Idealy it has to be only one word, but as we know any good one word name
is very hard to obtain.
Two or sometimes more good words in a name are not so bad either.

Every average site developer first thinks of submitting his site to a
search engine, so he will try to use all the tricks of the trade, among others
keywords on right places.
Unfortunately Google recently changed its alghoritm, number of links to a site
is the most imortant factor. Also being linked at more popular site gives more
points to your site too.

Keywords and other stuff are still in the game, though.
Having a keyword in the url (name) is also one of the positive things, but
again not so much important as many think.
Now, we came to the point of submitting our more-words-name to a SE crawler, spider
or any bug who collects our data, in order to achieve more points for better
position in search results.
Most, if not all SE don't have any or at least not a perfect way of distinguishing
more words inside a concatenated search phrase.
Our search phrase has a space but we are not allowed to register names
with spaces.
So how could we insert a space?
In domain name world and its surrounding software logic a hyphen is
exactly that a " " <space>.

What I say is that more-words domain tags with words separated by a hyphen WILL BE RECOGNIZED
by a search engine and bring more value (no matter how insignificant) to your name.

Of course, using hyphen in a senseless way brings nothing but lower rating.
So, don't be afraid of hyphen. On the contrary, use it whenever possible in a clever way.

 

[Duke]

Interesting post options. I tend to stay away from hyphens because I specialize in media names. Many of them are sites that would be advertised or talked about on radio or television, so having to explain a hyphen everytime you mention the site name is a huge problem. Even in normal day to day conversation you don't want to have to get that point across to anyone you have to address verbally.

For search engines only I see no problem, but most marketers in my field and many others constantly have to verbally convey the name of their site.

 

[Anthony Ng]

FACT: web-based.com couldn't even sell for $300 during the good old days (when e.g. I turned away $1,000 for hamilton.org and $2,000 for thornhill.net).

And you simply juxtaposing web-based.com with webbased.com and tell which makes more sense.

 

[options]

webb-ased.com

 

[DomainPairs]

Thanks for this posting options. I've just reg'd we-let.com as I hope to develop welet.com into an index of letting agents. What I realised from your posting is that there are two types of viewer - the computer and the human. The human would recognise we-let far more readily than welet. But when he got home he would probably type welet.com. The answer is to alias one to the other so it doesn't matter which they use.

 

[options]

With all respect DomainPairs, but I can't see much of the difference between welet.com and we-let.com.
From my point of view "letting agents" in any way would have some hits, altough developing remains very questionable, because of very little interest, unless you are already deep into the business.
In that case the name is of less importance, content counts.

 

[Domainaholic]

It's true about the serach engines and content, and hyphens are good for developed sites.

Type-ins however are another story. I have two good 2 word dot coms with and without the hyphen. The one with the hyphen gets less than 1/10 the typeins, even less than the dot net without the hyphen.

 

[DomainPairs]

A quick look at welet makes you think it is one word, and what the hell is a "welet". on the other hand we-let breaks it in two and it is obvious that it is we let.

 

[GiantDomains]

The hyphen/search engine connection has been dispelled as myth, however, I find it works. Just look at google for proof.

It does help SE's separate the words (in my opinion) in some cases.

 

[options]

You can't use Google search field for that. After all almost nobody searches with hyphens.
The problem with dash in Google search field is that it eliminate
the word following "-" sign.
Well it has to be preceded with space:

******************************************
" - " Searches

Sometimes what you're searching for has more than one meaning; "bass" can refer to fishing or music. You can exclude a word from your search by putting a minus sign ("-") immediately in front of the term you want to avoid. (Be sure to include a space before the minus sign.)

For example, to find web pages about bass that do not contain the word "music", type:

bass -music

***********************************************

However, if you use dash in Overture suggestion tool, you will get the same results as with space and that's the way internal SE logic works too.

 

[options]

Originally posted by Domainaholic
Type-ins however are another story. I have two good 2 word dot coms with and without the hyphen. The one with the hyphen gets less than 1/10 the typeins, even less than the dot net without the hyphen.

Azooz, can you tell what is the relationship between type-ins you
get and a search phrase count for the same month on e.g. Overture?
I've been collecting data about that too. Thanks.

P.S. I assume those are undeveloped sites, right?

 

[Domainaholic]

Very few from search engines (Overture = 48 searches total in Sep), I should have mentioned that the words are none English.

I'm not disapointed becuse the Arabic and Urdo words for "girls" got zero searchs according to overture to

Undeveloped and unpromoted - 2 pages, mostly baby pics, and a very few links.

 

[dotcom]

I've got to admit in regging my first domain www.dotcomwebdesign.com and damn i have had some major problems in conveying it when speaking to people.

I suppose search engine recogition is one thing but i think businesses also rely on word of mouth as well as there sales people promoting the site verbally close to their geographical position.

I tend to believe now, if i am thinking of regging a name, i ask a few friends over the phone to open up the old' IE and goto ""this site"". If they cant get there then I expect it would be a hard site for the majority of visitors to get to.

I think that makes sence
:razz:

 

[GiantDomains]

Originally posted by options
You can't use Google search field for that. After all almost nobody searches with hyphens.
The problem with dash in Google search field is that it eliminate
the word following "-" sign.
Well it has to be preceded with space:

You missed my point. My point is, sites WITH hyphens show up, when the search terms are entered W/O hyphens.

heres an example with apache ssl searched.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=apache+ssl

Hyphenated shows up first. The search engine was able to distinguish EACH search term BECAUSE of the hyphen.

 

[options]

You are right Doberry.
Sorry for misunderstanding.

It is even more visible when you search only results inside URL adress:
http://www.google.com/search?as_q=a...s_occt=url&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=&safe=images

(btw, one .org comes first)

Look only at the green green address, below the text.

I noticed one more interesting thing.
Our searched phrase will be recognized too if put into lower directory level, even if separated.

Look at the results below third place.
So, it is obviously not necessary to have search phrase inside the name, any directory on the site is good too.
E.g. www.doberry.com/sex/ would attract some strange visitors, I guess.

 

[dtobias]

At one point, various snake-oil salesmen were trying to get people to register lots of really long domains with keywords separated by hyphens in them in order to get better search engine ranking; my response was always to point out that, if this was actually effective at that purpose, you could most likely achieve the same result at less cost by creating appropriate subdomains of the domain you already have, like

lots.of.neat.keywords.yoursite.com

But solutions that merely involve making more use of the domains you already have never seem to go over well with people whose mindset centers around registering lots of new domains and getting everybody else to do it too, so they can build up a big speculative bubble with them.

 

[DomainPairs]

One reason for having multiple domains with different ips is to improve link popularity.

Another reason for using a hyphen is to try to attract surfers to a site through type-ins.
eg virus-help could be a site to help people with a virus infection. virushelp could be aliased to a computer hardware sales site.

 

[dtobias]

Of course, a subdomain can also be pointed at a different IP address, though search engine robots might be smart enough to realize they're connected because of the same domain suffix anyway.

 

[DomainPairs]

There are people selling sub-domains as domains at the moment

xxxx.uk.co for example.

 

[MarkyMark]

I think searchengines value exact match of dotcom address and specific search term pretty highly. I dont think hyphens is either bad or good (I think SE's can distinguish or "pull-out" words out of an URL without hyphens in it). When it comes to several hyphens in a row I think the SEs disqualify the domain/site for some reason.

The nastiest hyphen trick is this (example just taken out of the air, no specific criticism of the site)

http://www-cars.com

viewed in the SERPs a surfer would easily take it for the generic cars.com domain and click on it since it smells big player.

The reason we are seeing so many successfull hyphenated urls in the SERPs (search engine result pages) is that the compact ones are already taken by speculators, and developers have to use what is left.

For highly competitive serch terms I see almost only basic .com or .net urls (with or without hyphens). Subpages and subdomains are given a penalty as far as I can deduct.