This post is no longer valid – for an update on the SEO effect of Domain names and hypens, look at this more recent post.
Here’s a little test for you. Your name is Ray Costanza. You’re starting a new company and you want to sell drill bits. Should your domain name be www.raycostanza.com.au or www.drillbits.com.au? Well, maybe neither. Here Max Webster looks at SEO and Domain name considerations.
Using Keywords in your Domain Name is good for SEO
Your domain name is the first thing the search engine spiders see and their first clue to what your site is about. So, ideally, you want your domain to include keywords. So, if you sell drill bits, and the domain name www.drillbits.com.au is available, then this would be a good domain name, wouldn’t it? A better name than www.raycostanza.com.au. But perhaps not ideal.
SEO, Domain Names and Hyphens or Dashes
When Google looks at www.drillbits.com.au, it can read the words “drill” and “bits”, so it will know this site is likely to have something to do with drill bits. So, that’s good. However, if Google looks at www.drill-bits.com.au or www.drill.bits.com.au, it will rate those names higher than www.drillbits.com.au. This is kind of ironic – given that people tend to race out and buy domain names that run keyword together, whereas domains with the keywords separated by hyphens are very often still available. So, you should make www.drill-bits.com.au your domain name, right? Well, not necessarily.
Balancing SEO with Usability and Memorability
The problem is, it’s harder to type a dash or hyphen in a domain name than it is to just run the keywords together. So, from a usability point of view, www.drillbits.com.au is preferable. What’s more, it’s harder to get people to remember a domain name that includes a hyphen. For example, you’d prefer to be able to tell people that they should go to drillbits.com.au rather than drill-dash-bits-dot-com-dot-au – particularly if you’re running a radio ad campaign. You also won’t capture the person who just types in drillbits.com.au to see what comes up. So what’s the solution?
Buying multiple domain names and redirecting
The ideal solution would be:
- Buy www.drill-bits.com.au and make this your main website domain name
- Buy www.drillbits.com.au and redirect it to www.drill-bits.com.au
- Buy www.raycostanza.com.au and redirect it to www.drill-bits.com.au as well
- Use www.drillbits.com.au on all your company stationery
- Have all your company email addresses include the “drillbits” name (e.g. ray@drillbits.com.au)
This would give you the best of all worlds:
- The best SEO performance because Google loves www.drill-bits.com.au
- The best usability and memorability because people get to use www.drillbits.com.au
- And your highschool sweetheart can track you down by typing in www.raycostanza.com.au
Of course, we can’t always get the domain names we want. We’ll talk about some options in that situation in another post.
3 comments ↓
If drillbits.com and raycostanza.com are redirected to drill-bits.com they will do nothing for SEO. If you redirect something then Google is smart enough to only index the destination page. Unless the other domains are already indexed, and you then use 301=permanent redirect, then PageRank gets carried forward.
For drillbits.com and raycostanza.com to do anything for SEO they need to be landing pages or point to same site as drill-bits.com (if chosen as main site, see below). Although in some circumstances that can be considered “black hat” SEO, not always recommended.
If drill-bits.com is chosen as main site, and drillbits.com is used on all stationery, then you will waste PageRank for potentially having people adding links (important offpage SEO) to the “wrong domain”.
So what is the best option here? Is it to use a dash or not to use a dash. Am I better off using Arizona-Computer-Repair.com or ArizonaComputerRepair.com?
Go to the link at the top of this post – Google now prefers no dash. So if someone is looking for Arizona Computer Repair, arizonacomputerrepair.com will rank higher in search.
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