What's your opinion of hyphenated domain names?

Bob,

Thanks.

Ranking is determined by more than the spelling of a domain name.

Michael Ross

Excellent PageRank article...

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007...know-about-it/

Phil

[Dien Rice]

Originally Posted by bobmcalister

so , you are saying that the normal spelling and the hypenated spelling are read by the search engines as the SAME ?

then usatoday.com
and usa-today.com
would have the same ranking ? if that is so , then EVERY domain name would have to have the hypenated domain also, to be protected ?

Hi Bob,

To my knowledge, your search engine ranking is mostly dependent on (a) how many links you have in, (b) the words used in those links that are linking to you, and (c) the "Google page rank" of the pages that link to you (the higher the page rank of pages linking to you, the better).

What I was commenting on was part (b) - the words used in linking to you. That's because sometimes people link to you using your domain name.

For example, I might say...

"Go check out www.runningshoes.com "

Notice it's a link. But the "words used" in the link are www, runningshoes, and com.

On the other hand, let's say I said...

"Go check out www.running-shoes.com "

Notice that here, the words it is using for the link are www, running, shoes, and com (since the search engines seem to treat a hyphen the way they do a space). The search engine will see the phrase "running shoes" as part of this link, whereas for the earlier link, the phrase is "runningshoes" (with no space).

Of course, this is only a factor if people link to you using your domain name - as may happen sometimes. It has no effect if people link to you with other words, eg. like saying hey check out running shoes here. So it may have a small effect, in my opinion...

But I think the advantages of having a non-hyphenated domain name outweigh any small effect that I'm talking about here...

By the way, if you do a search on Google for "running shoes", you'll notice that www.runningshoes.com is the first result, and www.running-shoes.com is nowhere to be found (not on the first page, anyway). So does this contradict what I said?

If you check for links in to these domain names (using, say, Altavista), you'll see that runningshoes.com has 391 links in

http://www.altavista.com/web/results...nningshoes.com

while running-shoes.com has only 3 links in

http://www.altavista.com/web/results...ning-shoes.com

So on the 3 criteria I listed above (a, b, and c), runningshoes.com is beating the heck out of running-shoes.com on links in - which is probably the number 1 factor for search engine ranking. The effect I mentioned only helps if you have links in, and if people happen to link to you using your domain name (as people sometimes will do)...

I hope that helps!

Cheers,

Dien

Dien,

Thanks for explaining.

I just did a search for "running shoes" - with the quotes. And www.runningshoes.com is the last result on the page. The first result is...

Running Shoes - information from ePodiatry
Information from ePodiatry about running shoes, a comprehensive resource on podiatry, podiatric medicine and running shoes.
www.epodiatry.com/running-shoes.htm - 29k

Notice the searched term "running shoes" is in the title, description and url 3 times - it's highlighted each time.

While the www.runningshoes.com url in its link, is not highlighted as a match to my search term.

I repeated the search without the quote marks. www.runningshoes.com is still last (10th) but this time the url is highlighted.

Trying to second guess the search engines is like trying to take a close up photo of the horizon. An exercise in frustration.

Michael Ross

Thanks everyone for the response.
Scott S.