What's your opinion of hyphenated domain names?

[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