Should you have hyphens in your domain name?

Hyphenated domain names (eg. www.your-company-name.com) have been a source of contention amongst search marketeers for many years. The logic is that expertsechange.com doesn’t mean much to a search engine (experts-exchange or expert-sex-change)?

Some marketeers reckon that Google ignores domain name content, but MSN (now Live.com) does. I don’t agree, Google certainly gives more weight to content than to the domain name, but keywords in a domain name are still valuable.

Therefore, for search engine marketing, I would recommend using a keyword hyphenated domain name, if necessary. For other channels, hyphenation can be a pain (try giving an email address over the phone, “that’s phil at my hyphen company, no hyphen as in dash, no not an underscore a dash …”). Ideally you should register non-hyphenated addresses as well, to avoid confusion.

September 25, 2006 | Filed Under Google 

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