Is SEO friendly, using hyphen in Domain Name?

Hi EnaanFarhan, Welcome to SitePoint!

A domain without hyphen would generally be preferred as I think that is the first option to try if you’re not sure. For SEO I don’t think the hyphen in the domain matters much so long as it reflects the site content.

It could happend though, that the search ranking is affected positively by the similarity between the domain and the search queries your visitors might use looking for the content your site has.

I would register both to be safe, and then use the one without hyphen

Just my two cents.

Edit) Noticed your double topic in Get Started is deleted. Here in Domain is the right frorum.

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Search engines couldn’t care less whether you’ve got a hyphen or not.

But don’t just focus on SEO – consider the whole marketing aspect. People are more likely to type a web address without hyphens than with, all other things being equal. So if you’re trying to get people to go to small-book.com, there’s a good chance you’ll lose a fair number of your potential customers to smallbook.com, which is bad enough if that’s an unused domain but terrible if that’s a competitor’s website.

I recently had a situation where I had to listen to a recorded telephone message that was directing me to a web page where the page name was about ten words separated by hyphens – listening to the disembodied word reading the whole thing out including saying ‘hyphen’ 9 times was painful, and I’m sure a very high proportion of people don’t manage to type it in correctly.

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I agree. A group I’m involved with decided, some years ago, to register a domain with three hyphens because it seemed to improve legibility.And we regret it ever time we have to tell somebody the associated e-mail address.

The only time I might consider it would be if you had a name like brasssupplies.com, where brass-supplies.com might just help to ensure folk type the right number of ‘s’ in the middle.

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i think its better to have without hyphen, i am talking from search engine point of view, like domain: anexample.com is better than an-example.com

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hyphen is okay for SEO
but without hyphen look good

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I must say putting hyphen in domain name is not good understanding from search engine point of view.If you go with hyphen may it matters not enough search engine friendly.

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I guess it depends on exactly what you mean by “not good”.
Either way, it is only one consideration of many and will have little impact.

But it may make a small difference in SERPs

It seems Google does see dashes vs. underscores differently
underscores = “all one term”
hyphen = separate words

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There are more than 200 factors for ranking. It will be good if you get domain name without hypen. However, with hypen is also not bad. You can very well get domain name with hypen.

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Thank You Very Much :relaxed:

Sometimes all other things aren’t equal - for example expertsexchange.com probably wish they’d included a hyphen so that people can be sure that it is two words and not three.

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The hyphen helps avoid misunderstanding of ambiguous names like experts-exchange, powergen-italia.

I would think the hyphen should assist the search engine algorithm to separate the words to get the correct meaning otherwise a search for “expert sexchange” or “power genitalia” might give some disappointing results whilst searches for “experts exchange” or “powergen italia” might lead to some red faces or triggered filters.

OK those are humorous examples but it raises the question of how search engines separate words in domain names.
My guess is that they take the domain name string in conjunction with any hits on the search phrase in the body of the web pages and see if there’s a match with the domain name, hyphenated or not. Thus, if the page contained “powergen” that string would be spotted in either variant of the domain name and perhaps earn the site a slight boost in SEO.

Then there are the human aspects and I expect “experts exchange” would be inclined to use the hyphenated version.
Either way with a 2 word domain I’d tend to go for both but would normally incline to using the unhyphenated version with the other aliased to the same site. Also owning both prevents a third party holding the variant at risk of diluting your traffic.

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But they didn’t. http://expertsexchange.com is a real site and there is certainly nothing humorous about it.

Well that takes me to a domain for sale whereas hyphenated seems what I’d expect (but I didn’t specify the TLD in my examples to protect the innocent)

Looks like they finally became aware of the problem and added the hyphen. It never used to have the hyphen and existed without it for many years before moving to the new domain. Must be a relatively recent change - the last time I checked out that site the hyphen wasn’t there (and when I first checked it out about eitght or more years ago it didn’t have the hyphen then either).

Haha. Weird that they didn’t keep the old URL and redirect it, though. :grimacing:

Perhaps they did for a while - its a couple of years since I last tried to visit that site.

Ultimately when it comes to a domain name, you want it to be easy to remember, something people will actually type (like was already mentioned above, people don’t normally tend to type info into the search engine with hyphens), and you want it to perfectly reflect your brand. I don’t know if you have considered any of the nTLDs, or just .com, but a more unique nTLD extension could end up reflecting your brand in an even better way than the .com. And finally, before ever considering to register a domain, you want to check it’s history. There are many easy and free tools out there to do this. 1&1 has a very easy WHOIS domain lookup tool that I’ve used before. Just use something that gives you registration information, domain status, and gives you any info regarding abuse or penalties. You really don’t want to get stuck with a domain that was previously misused and then try to work it out of a deep pit of penalties. You can also check the domain out further by searching it without the domain extension, and see what comes up in the search results. See if people have mentioned this site and what they have said about it, and get an idea of the other ranking sites coming up, to get an idea of the niche that this domain was in before. You can also use archive.org to check what the site registered to this domain before actually looked like. That can give you a good impression of the type of site it was before and whether or not it may have been used for anything that would garner penalties.

Lol sorry for the long rant. The answer, to sum it up, is it doesn’t affect SEO, but you should always consider brand image when considering your domain. That is more important to your success. And don’t just register something that you think looks good without first doing your homework first. You will be happy later that you did.

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Slightly off topic but related…
It’s virtually impossible to find an unregistered dictionary word or proper noun .com (see llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.com !).
It’s even difficult to find 2 word combinations that suit the need of the site. As a result folk are ending up with multi-word domains like (fictitious example) associationofrefusetruckdrivers. That’s better rendered as camel case AssociationOfRefuseTruckDrivers or hyphenated but still a serious PITA for anyone who needs to type it in.
So why not buy a short alternative made up of the initials AoRTD (for SEO I guess best to own both, web site under the long version and short version pointing at the same site so people can remember it and type it in easily).

Take the first one on priority but if you want to choose the second one (with hyphen), it’s also SEO-friendly.