Domain-Names-with-Hyphens

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Update from Jerry West, June, 2009:

The best advice on domain names with hyphens is not to use them at all, because of the possibility that this may be interpreted as spam by Google. This advice is from Jerry West. June, 2009.

Michael Campbell-On-Domain-Names-with-Hyphens

Dateline: April 6, 2006.

"There were dozens of replies and comments on the hyphenated domain name story I ran last month. They ranged from from the moronic ... "You don't know what you're talking about, my domain has a hyphen and I'm top in Google." to the astute ...

"'I do vacation rental and real estate sites. There are some hyphenated domains that have consistently hung out on the first page for the past six years. I have a number of hyphenated domains and after reading what said I've begun to wonder if I will start suffering some sort of penalty.

When I realized you were talking about "affiliate categories' a light went on in my head. Yes, I'd imagine Google would target affiliate categories. I don't do affiliate marketing, so I don't watch those results.""

Yep, there's always exceptions to every rule. That's why I kept testing different markets - 18 tries - until I finally found a hyphenated domain in the top five. But as I wrote in the newsletter, when it comes to "categories that affiliates are known to battle over" hyphenated domains are nowhere to be found.

For anyone in doubt, I'd say go do the same thing I did.

Just go and check for yourself. My tests showed that the more competitive a phrase was for "affiliate revenue" the less hyphens there were in the domain names and the entire url. This applied to the top 20 results.

It's almost as if they have a list of the top 500 most competitive affiliate categories. Then run a filter to weed out any domain with more than one hyphen.

But that said... every market is different. When it came to city names and local services like window washing, or terms like "Seattle bakeries" there were plenty of hyphenated domains.

As for keywords appearing anywhere in the url... again, same thing. Just go and look for yourself. Do 50 or so searches on various phrases for YOUR market. Look at the top 20 results and come to your own conclusions.

Seems silly to me that there's do much debate about hyphens, when all you really need to do is go and look for yourself. So in the end, it doesn't matter what anyone "says" because the proof is in the pudding ... er I mean Google's search results pages."

From Michael Campbell's Internet Marketing Secrets newsletter, #88 April 6, 2006