Tag Archives: Yahoo

Are Domain Names With Hyphens Penalized?

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A hot debate in online SEO (= Search Engine Optimization) forums is whether domain names like, say, low-cost-web-site-hosting.com are deliberately being ranked lower by Google, MSN, Yahoo, and other search engines compared to the same name without hyphens, like: lowcostwebsitehosting.com.

Google’s engineer, Matt Cutts, is saying “No”. But it seems what he actually said was: “We don’t use hyphens as a spam signal.”

Is that the same as saying “No”? I think he’s side-stepping the question: “Do hyphenated domains get penalised?”. And as Google keeps its ranking formula a closely guarded secret, it’s not surprising he’s not giving a precise answer.

The fact is that there are any number of reasons why search engine ranking will rise or fall, and most reasons have nothing to do with whether the web site is spammy or not.

Observations suggest that hyphenated domains are not getting booted out of Google. Page Rank is maintained, so there is no obvious spam penalty. But… there do appear to be fewer and fewer domains with hyphens ranking in Google’s top 10 for popular searches.

So… if you want your site to rank well in the search engines, my advice would be to register a domain WITHOUT hyphens if you possibly can.

And don’t worry too much if your domain doesn’t include your site’s main keywords. A short, catchy domain name will likely be just as successful.

Are Dashed Domains Doomed?

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Rumour has it that there’s another Google algorithm update coming up in February.

This time Google allegedly wants to filter out web sites which they perceive as having overused keywords in domain names. Keywords of course refers to what searchers are thought to be typing into the search engines.

Here are a couple of examples I found on MSN today:
1-debt-consolidation-debt-reduction-service.com
credit-card-debt-consolidation-loan

A few years ago the search engines had difficulty understanding words unless they had spaces or hyphens (dashes). So webmasters registered domains with dashes between the words, knowing that the search engines would then rank their sites higher if the searched term was included in the domain as well as on the web pages.

Well progress marches quickly on and Google, MSN, Yahoo and the rest are now well able to understand words even when there are no spaces between them.

So what does all this mean to you, when registering your domain names?

Well, first of all, remember this is just a rumour. Colin McDougall of VEOReport.com says he has close contacts with important people at Google, including Matt Cutts, who have apparantly been feeding him these ‘tips’.

But even if they are untrue, it will do no harm if we concentrate in future on registering domains without dashes.

And we might also do ourselves some good by ignoring keywords altogether for our domain names. Instead go for ‘brand’ domains.