Comments on: Hyphens in URLs: Good or Bad for SEO?

By: Canonical SEO

Canonical SEO — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:16:45 +0000

Thanks for stopping by Tom. I haven’t seen issues with 1-2 hyphens in a domain name either. I own a few hypenated domains, but generally I almost always go with the non-hyphenated versions. I do agree that having 3, 4, 5 hyphens in a URL definitely “looks” spammy to me, but I’m not sure Google’s algorithm treats them any differently. I mean, there are people who are inexperienced with the Internet and SEO who buy domains like this-is-my-long-tail-domain.tld not knowing any better. I find it hard to believe that Google would penalize them simply because they had 4-5 hyphens in their domain.

I personally think .info, .biz, .org, .net all look much less legitimate (and much more prone to spammy, thin content sites) than a .com domain. 99% of the time the ONLY reason people buy domains with those TLDs is because the .com is already taken. Should they be penalized because they fit the “profile” of a spammy domain name? Google “says” they are TLD agnostic – all TLDs are treated equally. If this is the case then I have to believe that hyphenated and non-hyphenated domains would be treated the same since both are “valid” domain names.

I take SEOmoz tools and other tools like theirs with a grain of salt. They are not Google. Their spam detector is not the same as Google’s. It’s the product of Rand Fishkin’s opinions and the opinions of others on their staff that have input into the development of the tools. Those minds, while great minds, are totally different than the minds of those PhDs at Google coming up with Google’s algorithm.

But again… as with everything. We’re just guessing. The real test would be to buy a domain with 4 or 5 hyphens and another matching domain with hyphens, build out a similar site for each, and try to make them both rank for the same long tail phrase. See if you have issues making the domain with hyphens rank as opposed to the one without hyphens.

Since I rarely buy hyphenated domains, I simply haven’t been inclined to invest the time and effort to “prove” my theory that they would be treated the same.

By: Tom Elliott

Tom Elliott — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:22:01 +0000

From an SEO point of view, I think too many hyphens in a domain name could have a negative effect as they could look more like SPAM to Google. I’ve never noticed 1 or 2 hyphens to be an issue though.

Having said that, SEO Moz domain Spam checker seems to think otherwise with 1 hyphen adding quite a lot to the SPAM score
http://www.seomoz.org/labs_tools/spam-detection/

By: John

John — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 06:25:23 +0000

Thanks for your take – I have several domains with hyphens, but i also try to get them without as well although it is not always possible.

By: Salman qamar

Salman qamar — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:04:01 +0000

A very nicely explained article about the hyphen confusions in mind.

By: e11world

e11world — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:09:19 +0000

Well written article. I didn’t really think of the hyphen as being a good thing (better than under scores) in file/folder names.
I think I’ll actually change the way I write my file/folder names to using hyphens more. Possibly for my id’s and classes as well.