Hyphenated domain names are BAD
December 12, 2007 | 5 Comments
For those not familiar with this subject, let me give you a quick background summary.
Domain names can be purchased as “yourdomainname.com” or “your-domain-name.com” and you don’t automatically get both when making the purchase. Site owners have chosen to market their site this way for several reasons.
First, the domain name without the hyphens might not be available so the site owner opts to go with the next best thing.
Second, people have chosen to go this route to clearly place their specific keywords and key phrases in their domain name and separate them with hyphens to clearly spell out the words for the search engines. It’s not a bad idea to have your keywords in your domain name but the goal here is to target a very specific, high traffic key phrase and the practice has been abused. This technique has been popular for long, targeted key phrases that are commonly used by shady, spammy and illegal sites. For example, “buy-viagra-online-cheap.com”.
Google has said in 2005 that it doesn’t matter if you have hyphens but does this still stand up in 2008?
To answer a common question, 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 www.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.
In 2008 it’s becoming clear that the search engines might be starting to consider domain names like this to be less relevant and spammy than domain names without the hyphen. Many prominent figures in the industry have said that more than 3 hyphens in a domain name can raise a red flag.
We’ll keep an eye on this subject and we welcome your participation in the comments below. As a general practice try to choose a domain name without hyphens. It’s easier to remember and it reduces the risk that you might rate with lower relevance in the SERP’s due to your domain name style. Of course there is nothing wrong with securing your domain name with and without the hyphens to reduce confusion but I would definitely recommend using the non-hyphenated name whenever possible.
Where’s a good place to register domain names? Check out GoDaddy.com and NameBargain.com
