Do Search Engines Care If Your Domain Contains Hyphens?

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This is a pretty hotly debated topic at the moment, so I thought I would share what I have found in my research, as well as through experience…

According to Matt Cutts, Google mouthpiece, Google’s algorithm doesn’t penalize for use of hyphens even if there are more than 2 or even 3 in the domain name. There is also no reason to expect that you will rank better for keyword rich domains where the keywords are separated by hyphens. So keyword-rich-domains.com will fair no better with Google than keywordrichdomains.com will.

Of course this is not necessarily true of all search engines. For most of us, our main concern is what Google’s algorithm will or won’t do, but there are a lot of other search engines out there too.

The one area that Matt Cutts separated out was situations where there could be confusion as to where the breaks between keywords should be. An example shown was that of books-exchange.com vs. booksexchange.com for obvious reasons. Matt claims that Google can tell which division is appropriate for your site, presumably due to content.

But what if you are using that particular domain primarily as a redirect? I am not completely sure they would pick it up in that case, so keep that in mind when buying domains primarily as redirects…

Interestingly, Matt says that it is preferable to separate your keywords in a path by hyphens as many search engines will pick them up much better this way. He specified that hyphens were far better than underscores. What we are referring to here is the section of a particular url that occurs after the extension (.com, .net, .info…).

So according to this theory yourdomain.com/whatever-you-want.html is better than yourdomain.com/whateveryourwant.html for many search engines.

To take advantage of this in your WordPress blogs you need to change the Permalink structure under Settings to Custom and type in this: /%category%/%postname%.html

This changes the pathways structure for your blog and allows you to hyphenate the keywords you choose to include in the pathway portion of the url for each post. Take a look at the url for this post to see what I mean.

None of this is to say there aren’t downsides to hyphens in the root domain such as best-domains.info Most of these have to do with verbally communicating your website address and the confusion that can result. Some people also think that a non-hyphenated domain name just looks better.

These are not entirely frivolous concerns, but let’s face it folks we are also dealing with a commodity that is not unlimited! There are definite advantages to keyword rich domains just ast there are advantages to a .com over a .net or a .info as this site uses.

So you weigh your desired keywords over extension availability. You take into account whether your keywords should be hyphenated, or even if they non-hyphenated domain is available. Keeping in mind your intended use for the domain (redirects) you then make the best decision available to you…

Competition over keyword rich domain names is at a fever pitch these days, so these issues are not going away anytime soon, or probaby ever!

My advise is to use the extensions necessary to get the keywords you want but be alert to opportunities that present themselves in the marketplace. Use hyphens to get your desired keywords when you need to, or to segment ambiguous domain names when necessary.

Keyword Rich Domain Names | Do Search Engines Care If Your Domain Contains Hyphens?