The Truth about Hyphenated Domain Names and SEO
November 3, 2005 | Category: Page Optimization, Search EnginesMost people understand the benefits of having keywords in a domain name, but one question that is often asked in forums is whether it is necessary to separate keywords with hyphens.
Although many people have the misconception that search engines aren’t smart enough to pick out keywords without the help of hyphens, they are sorely mistaken. When you give it some though, it would be pretty pathetic if a search engine like Google, which maintains an index of over 10 billion web pages, couldn’t pick out simple keywords from a string of characters. Fortunately, it has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can, and that placing a hyphen in your domain (or not) should have no direct effect whatsoever on your search engine rankings.
When it comes to picking domains, it simply isn’t worthwhile to use a hyphen simply for the imagined SEO benefit. In the vast majority of cases, it’s preferable to pick an unhyphenated name (if it is available) for the simple purpose of proper branding.
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Published by WealthStream Innovations
Although it is proper branding to not use dashes in a domain name, for Google SEO a URL that looks like this example.com/keyword-keyword-keyword.htm works best (as I can see from your URL, you have it figured out
).
Comment by Ignat — November 4, 2005 #
Yes, it’s a good idea to have hyphens in filenames, but not because it makes any major difference to SEO. It’s more an issue of user-friendlyness and readability.
Just because search engines are capable of picking out keywords from a long string of characters doesn’t mean that human readers can.
Comment by Jeremy — November 4, 2005 #
Hyphenated domains are difficult to type, and are not prefered user friendly.
Moreover Search Engines are becoming aware of hyphens, and text used in domain names. Generally they give low ranking to those website. Quite Strange !!! But True
Search Engine, SEO Marketing Company India
Comment by seo marketing services company — May 3, 2006 #