There is a very real possibility that hyphenated domains have a negative impact on scoring with Google because historically hyphenated domains have been spammy (vs. un-hyphenated domains) - and Google has picked up on this correlation.
How one tiny hyphen destroyed our SEO efforts (2011)
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Re: How one tiny hyphen destroyed our SEO efforts (2011)
#22Re: How one tiny hyphen destroyed our SEO efforts (2011)
#23When I google frictionless owls, I get the following top 3:
www.frictionlessowls.com
frictionless-owls.com
www.frictionlessowls.co.uk
So the takeaway I guess is that hyphens are bad but not as bad as having to use .co.uk :-)
Re: How one tiny hyphen destroyed our SEO efforts (2011)
#24We recently had an internal debate about whether the anti-hyphen bias extends to the rest of the url. We haven't tested it though. I'd be curious if anyone has ...
The suspected reasons to why there's an anti-hyphen bias (primarily, fakers trying to capitalized on well-known non-hyphenated names) don't seem to apply for the rest of the url. i.e. a legit brand has no control over what a spammer does with an impostor domain, but the legit brand has complete control over what their own url structure looks like
Good point as to domain credibility. But I have to admit that I groan whenever I see a legit brand with a url that is: .com/our-red-widgets-are-perfect-for-your-classic-1957-red-chevy/
The sheer number of people doing it makes me wonder if at some point they'll implement it, if they haven't already.
Re: How one tiny hyphen destroyed our SEO efforts (2011)
#25We recently had an internal debate about whether the anti-hyphen bias extends to the rest of the url. We haven't tested it though. I'd be curious if anyone has ...
You mean like http://example.com/something-about-something ? Matt Cutts actually recommends using hyphens in this case: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
Thanks for the link! Very helpful. However, my own searching suggests Google treats /something-about-something/ similar to /somethingaboutsomething/. So it isn't a perfect example. If the same content is on both url's, would one always win?
Our own debate was whether to hyphenate a two word phrase in the directory structure: /kitchensink/whatever/ vs /kitchen-sink/whatever/. So we had to do a similar debate as the domain hyphen analysis. Spam signal/Google treatment vs. User Convenience vs. Does it really matter.
Re: How one tiny hyphen destroyed our SEO efforts (2011)
#26I suspect (not tested in this study) that the hyphenated version is seen as a possible fake if the unhyphenated version also exists . That is to say, face-book could be seen as fake because facebook exists, but a novel hyphenated phrase like vexing-sesquipedalian would not suffer the penalty because vexingsesquipedalian hasn't been used. It would be tricky to test this, because you need to use a domain with hyphens w…
I would think that in practice the overwhleming majority of hyphenated .com would also have an unhyphenated version (even if just a squatter)
Re: How one tiny hyphen destroyed our SEO efforts (2011)
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exception that proves the rule.
I don't think evidence against a belief works like that.
Proves: 3. To determine the quality of by testing; try out.[1]
The expression "The Exception that proves the rule" is just a wry way of saying "Well, that's not a perfect rule."
Re: How one tiny hyphen destroyed our SEO efforts (2011)
#28I have an hyphenated domain name and it has a very decent page rank. What I have found is that for a particular keyword the sites with that keyword in the domain name will rank higher than ones without the keyword.
Re: How one tiny hyphen destroyed our SEO efforts (2011)
#29When I google frictionless owls, I get the following top 3: www.frictionlessowls.com frictionless-owls.com www.frictionlessowls.co.uk So the takeaway I guess is that hyphens are bad but not as bad as having to use .co.uk :-)
I wonder if you'd get the same result running the search from as a british google user (UK IP, gmail/google account obviously from britain)
Re: How one tiny hyphen destroyed our SEO efforts (2011)
#30When I google frictionless owls, I get the following top 3: www.frictionlessowls.com frictionless-owls.com www.frictionlessowls.co.uk So the takeaway I guess is that hyphens are bad but not as bad as having to use .co.uk :-)
I wonder if you'd get the same result running the search from as a british google user (UK IP, gmail/google account obviously from britain)
Positions two and three swapped for me. Searching from .co.uk from Firefox private browsing. With this post gaining popularity though (it appears at position 5 for me), I doubt we can learn anything more from these sites.