Ask HN: Hyphenated domain names, good or bad? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Hyphenated domain names, good or bad?

#11

Post by puredemo » Tue, Dec 28, 2010, 12:43 AM UTC

cheae wrote: post #9

puredemo wrote: post #8

Isn't this obvious? Name a single popular startup with a dash in their domain.

http://www.digital-photography-school.com/ It is a very successful website.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digital-photography-school....

Fair enough, they do have some good stats. Still very much the exception however.

Re: Ask HN: Hyphenated domain names, good or bad?

#12

Post by arn » Tue, Dec 28, 2010, 12:44 AM UTC

I'd say if your business depends primarily on search/keyword traffic then hyphens are ok. Otherwise, no, since you are just giving away traffic to the non-hyphenated domain.

Example of search/kw dependent domain would be something like if you sold wedding favors (wedding-favors.com, for example).

Re: Ask HN: Hyphenated domain names, good or bad?

#13

Post by Rubyred » Tue, Dec 28, 2010, 4:31 AM UTC

If you are going to use hyphens, go f-u-n-k-y with it. Might be able to score some awesome domain names that way.

Re: Ask HN: Hyphenated domain names, good or bad?

#14

Post by abznak » Tue, Dec 28, 2010, 8:43 AM UTC

It's not necessarily because dash-domains are bad, but out of the top million websites, domains containing a hyphen are less common among the more popular sites. See histogram at http://abznak.com/pub/20101228_dashdomain.png

Re: Ask HN: Hyphenated domain names, good or bad?

#15

Post by notahacker » Tue, Dec 28, 2010, 12:00 PM UTC

it could significantly reduce the value of the site if much of your potential word-of-mouth traffic goes to the non-hyphenated domain first

Germany seems to be the exception in preferring hyphenated domains, which is probably a consequence of trying to avoid multi-word domains being confused with the German language's many clumsy-looking compound words