Too Many Dashes in Domain Name???

[bigcat1967]

Hey guys:

I heard that Google looks down on a URL with to many dashes.

For an example, if I want to put up a site named bull-dog-pet-food dot com so I have a shot over a period of time ranking well w/in the niche "Bull Dog Pet Food" - is that to spammy or does Google rank URLs w/ that many dashes in them - and does Google rank them well?

Just wondering.

 

[djbaxter]

As long as you don't go nuts about it, dashes in domain names are fine.

See http://affiliate-marketing-forums.5...te-forum/25246-using-dashes-domain-names.html

Dashes vs. underscores
August 25, 2005

I often get asked whether I’d recommend dashes or underscores for words in urls. For urls in Google, I would recommend using dashes. Why? To find out, let’s take a trip in the Google Time Machine. Set the dial for 1999, the year Matt first discovered Google. Matt was using, I dunno, maybe HotBot at that point? The curtain rises:

Matt: Hmm, this search for [FTP_BINARY] didn’t turn out the way I wanted. I got a couple scuzzy looking urls, and the other documents just have the words “FTP” and “BINARY” but the term “FTP_BINARY” doesn’t actually appear. (Note: Matt was a bit of a nerd, as you can tell.)

Some Random Person That I Don’t Remember: Have you tried Google?

Matt: What’s that?

SROTIDR: It’s a search engine written by nerds for nerds! They index numbers! Sometimes they even index punctuation, like “C++”. Try your underscore search there.

Matt: Okay, here goes. Whoa! They actually return pages with the literal string “FTP_BINARY”! That’s wicked cool! (Did I mention Matt was a nerd? Big-time nerd.)

SROTIDR: Yeah. The wild thing is that they wrote a paper about how they crawl the web and rank pages.

Matt: Well, now that’s just silly. I wonder why they didn’t keep it a secret? I bet those papers will make great reading for my information retrieval class.
​

I’ve stylized the conversation quite a bit, but I remember how impressed I was that Google indexed numbers and some punctuation (come to think of it, search engines have come a long way in five years). With underscores, Google’s programmer roots are showing. Lots of computer programming languages have stuff like _MAXINT, which may be different than MAXINT. So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2?.

That’s why I would always choose dashes instead of underscores. To answer a common question, Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url. Of course I can only speak for Google, not other search engines. And bear in mind that if your domain looks like www.buy-cheap-viagra-online-while-consolidating-your-debt-so-you-can-play-texas-holdem-while-watching-porn.com, that may still attract attention for other reasons.

Bing Uses Hyphens As Word Separators in URLs[/URL]
Search Engine Roundtable Blog
April 1, 2010

A Bing Community thread[/URL] has Bing's program manager, Brett Yount confirming that Bing prefers hyphens in the URLs as a word separator.
He said:

Hyphens are the preferred character for separating two words in URLs.​

Google also uses hyphens as word separators[/URL] so it is a good thing to know both engines handle them pretty much the same way.

 

[Oregon Coast Guy]

The general rule I stick with is:

One to two words, no dashes

Three or more words, dashes are good.

When the domain name is long, dashes help the readability.

If I have a domain that is very important to me, I tend to register it as a com, net and org and, if three or more words, with the dashes and without.

As I said, the longer domains with dashes make it easier to read and when I also register it without the dashes, it's easier to tell people, face-to-face. I don't want to tell them, "go to romantic dash oregon dash coast dot com."

 

[Seleyna]

question – is: millionaire-tomorrow-website.com the same as millionairetomorrow-website.com as far as SEO is concerned?

 

[Sabrina178]

The downside to dashes is you will get virtually no type-in traffic and there's a higher chance previous visitors will forget the actual URL and go elsewhere (possibly by accident).

 

[djbaxter]

question ? is: millionaire-tomorrow-website.com the same as millionairetomorrow-website.com as far as SEO is concerned?

I don't think so. I think that the hyphenated name is more easily and less ambiguously parsed into the separate keywords.

The downside to dashes is you will get virtually no type-in traffic and there's a higher chance previous visitors will forget the actual URL and go elsewhere (possibly by accident).

That's why you buy both and redirect the non-hyphenated version to the hyphenated.

 

[jzhao1688]

To google is not spam, but to the client who is looking at your site may think it's spammy

 

[TheWholeInternet314]

I'd probably never do more than three. Though my guess with Google is that things like these are just little pieces to a much bigger total ranking, so I don't think you're going to have a hard time ranking as long as it's not overly excessive.

 

[gabquotesl]

i once read that you shouldnt have more than 3 dashes in your url and it seems logical because too much long urls are not a good solution. how ever when it come to blogging and article marketing i see lots of url with dashes

 

[djbaxter]

There is a difference between dashes in the domain name and dashes in the URL. The latter is common in, for example, WordPress blogs or forums, and a limit of three makes little sense there. However, more than one or two in a domain name does look spammy and unprofessional to many (most) people.

 

[Cindy Bidar]

You should also consider how you'll be promoting your site. If only via clickable links, then dashes are fine. But if you'll be talking it up on podcasts, in videos, or in person, saying "bull dash dog dash pet dash food dot com" is going to be a bit cumbersome.

 

[djbaxter]

Good point.

 

[FitGal]

Agreed very good point and one I didn't thing about.

Thanks for sharing.

 

[walter_white1]

yeah but the only people who chase after type in traffic are.

major sites

and domainers..

other than that it's all up in the air.

The downside to dashes is you will get virtually no type-in traffic and there's a higher chance previous visitors will forget the actual URL and go elsewhere (possibly by accident).

 

[yanamk]

I think that even if google doesn't consider a four word domain with dashes as spam, this kind of domain looks kind of ugly and long... Noone will ever remember it and type it directly in the address bar. I know that this is not the agenda and we all worry mostly about where do we stand in google ranking, however i personally think that two dashes are enough...

 

[Denali]

My understanding is that dashes make no difference to the search engines. However, if you give out your domain name a lot verbally, rather than as a link, the dashes will hurt. Imagine telling someone your domain is my-personal-website.com vs. mypersonalwebsite.com. I think it depends on how you intend to use and market your business.

 

[FitGal]

One of my domains has a dash in it and it is in top 3 at Google. That said I would have gotten the "dashless" one had it be available.