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When it comes purchasing domain names, I’ve seen a lot of my colleagues purchase hyphenated domains because the non-hyphenated versions were already taken by someone else. I don’t really think that’s a wise practice because most type-ins (surfers who type in a domain name rather than landing on a website via a search engine) will type in the name without the hyphens. In that case I just recommend spending a little bit of time and getting a bit creative to come up with a unique domain name.
But if you dismiss the type-in traffic, can a hyphenated name really hurt you? Not so according to Bing’s program manager, Brett Yount and Google software engineer Matt Cutts whose blog has become the voice of Google’s best practices for SEO. Both have publicly stated that hyphens in a URL act as keyword separators.
In fact, google actually recommends hyphenating keywords in a URL.
“Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.” (Google Webmaster Central)
So why exactly is hyphenation important? Well let’s look at this domain name bostoncollegeofarts.com. Now let’s look at the same domain name punctuated two separate ways:
boston-college-of-arts.com
boston-college-o-farts.com
Which would you rather attend?
Now I realize that this is a silly example, but it does point out that the search engines are fallible and cannot always understand what keywords you are going after based on your URL. We also know that pages with keywords in their URL get ranked better than pages without. So am I really suggesting that you buy hyphenated domain names? Well yes, and no.
Personally I would actually buy both the hyphenated and non-hyphenated domain names. I would set up my content on the non-hyphenated domain name and redirect the hyphenated domain name traffic to the former. I would point a few links to the hyphenated name however in the hopes that those links would add some clarification to my keywords and let a redirect handle any link juice loss, but I’ll touch more on domain redirection for SEO benefits in another post.
When it comes to file names or directories I almost always hyphenate them. That way I can make sure that the search engines are crystal clear about what keywords I am going after on that specific page and I know I’m not going to lose on type-in traffic beyond the root domain. Besides according to the guys who work at the major players in the search engine game, it can’t hurt.
Tags: Bing, Brett Yount, domain name, Google, hyphenated, hyphens, keyword seperators, Matt Cutts, SEO, type-in, URL
(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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