Comments on: Should You Include Hyphens In Domains Names?

By: » Should you use Hyphens in Domain Names? Domain Name News, The Domain Industry News, ICANN News, Registry News, Domainer News, Domain

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 03:38:35 +0000

[…] Reprinted and amended with permission from Sahar Sarid’s The Conceptualist Post - November 27th, […]

By: Crystal L. Cox

Crystal L. Cox — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 05:37:23 +0000

Is it true that from an SEO standpoint it makes no difference. The top SEO books say that a dash is better for SEO. The books on eBook promotions also suggest that a dash is better for the search engines. Yes saying the name over the phone is hard and yes you want the version without dashes but so much informatio points to dashes being a good thing. However, you don’t see many dashes in the search results.

By: Available Domain Names

Available Domain Names — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 00:13:27 +0000

I didn’t think there’s much in it. Sometimes it looks more professional to not have a hyphen but sometimes the lack of hyphen can make a domain name ambiguous (see http://www.domainnamesoup.com/forum/funny-domain-names-t10.html).

From an SEO point of view, there is no difference.

By: David Wrixon

David Wrixon — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 22:34:02 +0000

All domains should be intuitive to users in their target markets. That is what the whole game is about. In Russian, it is very common to have words linked with hyphens. They don’t really make much sense without the hyphens, so it is presumably intuitive to type the domain name with the hyphen. Build your business on one without the hyphen and you are going to be at the same disadvantage as US names with the hyphen where the hyphen is not intuitive.

By: Rob Sequin

Rob Sequin — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 18:50:22 +0000

Having a domain with a dash is about as valuable as having a non-.com extension. So, joes-diner.com is about as valuable as joesdiner.net etc.

I would always choose the .com obviously because the hypen name with loose traffic to the .com and a hyphenated name is hard to say over the phone and the few times I heard someone tell me their hyphenated domain over the phone, I immediately thought less of their site.

Maybe in some cases it does make sense to use hyphens for names like keyword-domains.com and wireless-services.com in order to break up two matching letters.

There is some who might argue that the dash breaks up words which is good for seo.