Value-of-domains-with-a-hyphen

[HellaGood]

Do think domains with a hyphen are worth less than an unhyphenated one? The hyphen makes the name easier to read, but the surfer may forget to insert it, which makes it a draw for me.

As I mentioned in an earlier thread, I own a domain called new-apartment.com. That's a hella good name to me, but is it worth less because of the hyphen?

 

[Xrproto]

no hyphen > hyphen

as far as type in traffic goes you would be sending a lot of traffic to newapartment.com

 

[GoodKarma]

Domains without hyphens are easier to remember for your visitors, and you may get some traffic from people who search a site by typing in their address bar.

However, SEO wise, hyphen are a little better, it will help your site rank a little better (especially with Yahoo and MSN, maybe less with Google) if you have a keyword rich domain name separated with hyphen.

So, it depends on what is more important for you. I think, if you have good content on your site, it's better to go without hyphen.

 

[ScottDaMan]

GoodKarma, I did a full day of research on this from other "SEO Experts" from various forums and found the exact opposite of what you just said, overwhelmingly.

However, it was mentioned quite a few times that for google, it is such a small boost that it really doesn't matter. What matters? Inbound links to the site.

I would love to see someone buy whateverdomain.com and whatever-domain.com and add exactly one link from the same source and test to see what happens in 30-90 days.

Otherwise, hyphen/no-hyphen for SEO is a theory to me.

No hyphen, no matter the result from SEO, still wins for typein.

 

[GoodKarma]

I agree that it doesn't matter so much for Google. As you said, links are the key to a good ranking with Google.

Here is an interesting experiment on Google Parsing Keywords in Domains, it shows that Google doesn't parse them if they are run together (not separated by hyphens).

But yes, that doesn't tell if whatever-domain.com would rank better than whateverdomain.com in Google SERPs, that would be interesting to know.

 

[Propellorhead]

A point was made about the - hyphen- and type in traffic which is bang on in many respects.
If you are ever going to do anything other than straight organic search with a hypenated site you are going to be sending the owner of the non hyphenated version a lot of FREE business.

 

[ArtRage]

You just can buy both domains

 

[Andrew]

they-used-to-say-it-helped-with-SEO-I'm-not-so-sure