Domain name with or without a dash?

J

Jon Spivey

Yes it will make a difference. todays-news.com would be better than
todaysnews.com from an SEO point of view if you were targetting the phrase
"todays news" the dash would give you a slight edge but of course this may
be over-ridden by more important factors. If you think most of your traffic
will come from search engines it might be best to choose a domain with
dashes to match your phrase - assuming you can buy the domain, most are
taken or up for sale at ridiculous prices. The problem with dashes is it's
hard for users to pass the domain name around - by phone etc.
 
T

Tina Clarke

Johny said:
Hi

Does it make a difference to search engine placement if the domain name has
a dash in it

eg www.todays-news.cooom or www.todaysnews.coooom

thought welcome
Thanks
Click to expand...

Yes it does.

http://frontpage-tips.com has two keywords in it 'frontpage' and 'tips'
together they are also a phrase, if your site is about FontPage Tips then
you have a more targetted keyword domain name.

When buying your domain you should cover all bases though
example

http://clarke-abstract-art.com clarke-abstract.art.net clarkeabstractart.com

and use a 301 (only) redirect (do not duplicate content) point the other two
to the domain you use ... use your http://clarkeabstractart.com type domain
OFFLINE on all correspondance flyers cards etc etc .. for ONLINE use
http://clarke-abstract-art.com the other one you just bought to 'protect'
against domain hyjackers.

You should also put your keywords into your file names h1 and h2 tags and
your titles for each targetted page.

Don't use more than three dashes though .. and they should be dashes - NOT
underscores _.

Also stick to ONE presentation of your domain if you want www at the
beginning use that EVERY TIME and make sure anyone linking uses it if you
don't then make sure that way is used .. I prefer without.

When linking from any index page on the site (every folder should have a
index page (or homepage) use the full url without index.htm index.html (or
whatever ) in it. For instance a folder name might be
http://addonfp.com/formatting/ when you click on that folder name the
index.htm does not appear in the url ... in FrontPage to do this you need to
put the full url http://addonfp.com/formatting/ (always best to present
urls with the slash as well - not only domain and folder files though not
page files like .htm .asp etc.)

Does this help?

Tina

http://accessfp.net/ - FrontPage Tutorials
http://anyfrontpage.com/ - http://frontpage-ebooks.com/
http://addonfp.com/ - FrontPage Addons
http://frontpage-tips.com/ - Weekly FrontPage Tips
http://msmvps.com/frontpage/ - FrontPage News & Articles Blog
http://frontpage-advice.blogspot.com/ - FrontPage Advice Blog
http://artdoodle.com/ - Abstract Pen and Ink Drawings
 
J

Jon Spivey

Wow, good post :)

--
Cheers,
Jon
Microsoft MVP

Tina Clarke said:
Yes it does.

http://frontpage-tips.com has two keywords in it 'frontpage' and 'tips'
together they are also a phrase, if your site is about FontPage Tips then
you have a more targetted keyword domain name.

When buying your domain you should cover all bases though
example

http://clarke-abstract-art.com clarke-abstract.art.net
clarkeabstractart.com

and use a 301 (only) redirect (do not duplicate content) point the other
two
to the domain you use ... use your http://clarkeabstractart.com type
domain
OFFLINE on all correspondance flyers cards etc etc .. for ONLINE use
http://clarke-abstract-art.com the other one you just bought to 'protect'
against domain hyjackers.

You should also put your keywords into your file names h1 and h2 tags and
your titles for each targetted page.

Don't use more than three dashes though .. and they should be dashes - NOT
underscores _.

Also stick to ONE presentation of your domain if you want www at the
beginning use that EVERY TIME and make sure anyone linking uses it if you
don't then make sure that way is used .. I prefer without.

When linking from any index page on the site (every folder should have a
index page (or homepage) use the full url without index.htm index.html (or
whatever ) in it. For instance a folder name might be
http://addonfp.com/formatting/ when you click on that folder name the
index.htm does not appear in the url ... in FrontPage to do this you need
to
put the full url http://addonfp.com/formatting/ (always best to present
urls with the slash as well - not only domain and folder files though not
page files like .htm .asp etc.)

Does this help?

Tina

http://accessfp.net/ - FrontPage Tutorials
http://anyfrontpage.com/ - http://frontpage-ebooks.com/
http://addonfp.com/ - FrontPage Addons
http://frontpage-tips.com/ - Weekly FrontPage Tips
http://msmvps.com/frontpage/ - FrontPage News & Articles Blog
http://frontpage-advice.blogspot.com/ - FrontPage Advice Blog
http://artdoodle.com/ - Abstract Pen and Ink Drawings
Click to expand...
 
D

David Baxter

It was indeed.

However, any advantage of hyphenated domain names or hyphenated page
names is small at best and probably getting smaller. Google at least is
getting better at parsing compound or partial words like todaysnews.com
and there have been some small hints that they may be devaluing
hyphenated domain names.

Most of the value of Google rankings comes from anchor text in links to
your page. MSN and Yahoo pay rather more attention to on-page content.
 
J

Jon Spivey

Links are getting less important because they're easier to fake. Do a view
source on a google results page and then do a find on onmousedown - it
should be obvious what's going on.
 
J

Jon Spivey

I wasn't saying that click tracking (the onmousedown thing) is eveidence of
links being devalued just that it's of the many other other factors that
seem to be gaining more importance than links.

In my experience, which may well differ from others, I've found it much
easier now to get top 10 rankings without links. The last site I put live 10
days ago already has about 500 keywords top 10 in google with no links, this
would have been harder to do in the past.
 
D

David Baxter

New sites often show a "newbie boost" -- wait and see what happens in
another week or two.

Links aren't the only thing at Google (Google notes that PageRank is
only one of more than 100 factors in the algorithm) but they are still
the most important single thing.
 
J

Jon Spivey

That only applies to sites that have their ranking based on links - google
sandboxes links to new sites for a couple of months. This site is all on
page, just 1 link from another to get the ball rolling. So it "should" keep
its rankings - in fact I'd put money on it ;-)
 
T

Tom J

Jon Spivey said:
That only applies to sites that have their ranking based on links -
google sandboxes links to new sites for a couple of months.
Click to expand...

I was surprised when Google picked up links to a new site in 3 days of
it going on line. The site is not listed yet, but the links are there,
so it can be found. I put in "Fleetwood Travelcade club" and got 2
links already.
 
S

Steve Easton

That's because Google indexes sites via the domain name system. If a new domain appears in DNS,
Google follows it to the IP address that relates to the domain. If there's "nothing" there it will
eventually stop listing the "domain."

imho it makes no difference if the domain name is myweb.com or my-web.com because when you really
think about it, a domain name resolves to an IP address in DNS. Always has, always will.
If you click www.95isalive.com in your browser the DNS system converts it to:
http://216.74.96.157/~alive/
( for a shared IP address )

Either will open the web site, as will clicking a link to the actual name server with the domain
appended:
http://spider.mywwwserver.com/~alive/

;-)

--
Steve Easton
Microsoft MVP FrontPage
95isalive
This site is best viewed............
........................with a computer
 
D

David Baxter

Actually, no one except Google really knows what causes a site to be
"sandboxed" or even if that's what happens to new sites -- there is a
LOT of speculation but it's worth remembering that it's really just
speculation -- some better informed than others but speculation
nonetheless.
 
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