Paying a premium or going with a hyphenated domain
-
Q1. I have two domains I am interested and the are available, however, they are "premium" at $1,000! According to GoDaddy, another domain site, just said available through action.
Any recommendations? If I have to pay, is there an auction site or broker you would recommend or another approach to try to get it at a lower price?Q2. The hyphenated domains are available and affordable. However some of the information I gathered on MOZ mentions Google flags it as spam. I believe that article was dated 2014. Is that still a risk or has Google through AI or something else determine spam another way now?
-
Q1.
I'm not a domainer, but it's been my general experience that trying to negotiate directly with the owner has a much wider range of risk/reward. In other words, you might be able to contact them and get it for $250, or they might be completely insane and want $250,000 for junk, even though every other person on earth knows that's ridiculous. With the fixed-price sales, you can at least make that decision of whether it's worth the price tag for you.
That decision, though, isn't primarily an SEO decision, IMO, it's a business decision. Paying $1,000 for the right domain could be an incredible bargain if this site is your bread and butter and the name is critical. It could be a huge waste of money if this is your personal blog and a hundred different names would do just as well. It's really hard to advise you in a vacuum. If you asked me if $1,000 was a good price for an iPad, I could confidently say "no", but the value of a domain is highly subjective.
Q2.
I don't believe there's any kind of outright penalty. Hyphenated domains do often correlate with spammy domains, and it may be one signal of many Google considers, but I think they look at it clustered with other factors (that's speculative on my part). So, if your domain looks spammy on other dimensions and you've got a hyphenated, keyword-loaded domain, then yes, it might cause you problems. I don't think you'll get whacked just because of the hyphens.
I do think that hyphenated domains have a general trust issue with humans, though. It's not insurmountable, but I tend to agree with Michael -- there's always a non-hyphenated variant or an alternate TLD (even a .co) that's worth considering. Unless you're Eugene's Discount Widgets and your board will not settle for an domain but a .com with those three words in it and no other words, there are probably non-hyphenated options worth exploring.
-
I have never been a fan of paying for "premium" domains, especially since Google put out that the TLD does not affect ranking. Anytime I am rolling out a new site I will just find the best available option that does not have a bunch of negative baggage associated with it. In general, you should expect to have a harder time ranking a URL with a hyphen in it, but if you are concerned you can always shop around for other .(dot) extensions.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO threats of moving from [.com.au] domain to [.com] domain for a 15yr old SAAS company.
Hey Guys. I work for a 15 yr old SAAS company which originally started with a country-specific [.com.au] domain and later got a [.com] domain as the business grew. The AU website has a DA:56 while the [.com] has as DA: 25. Now we are looking to have everything migrated to the [.com] domain. But, my concern is that we might lose the SEO value of the AU domain. I was wondering if anyone has any experience in this or recommend a case study on this topic. Thanks! Allan
Algorithm Updates | | allanhenryjohn0 -
Having 2 domains with same name - Impact on SEO
Hi AllAs we still dwindle with the rankings not coming in line with the efforts.I have a question: We have 2 websites 1. http://www.example.com/ (which lost traffic and rank in Jan 2013). So we assumed that it was due to some penguin penalty. So we worked on disavow extra but nothing actually helped.Though there was no manual penalty mentioned in the GWT. Frustrated with this we thought of having another website 6 months back: 2. https://example.org/ - we did all the right things and by the book. But we are not seeing ranking here too. We did backlink analysis on all competitors and worked on only quality links they had. So all our links are highly highly relevant. But still the ranks are not moving beyond third page...in fact they moved to 6-7 page in last 2-3 days. Please suggest .. 1. is it due to same name of domain (our brand name) causing the issue. If yes should we go for 302 or 301 redirect to save ourselves from any penalty that our last website may have got. We can not leave that name unattended as our cataloges etc have that website mentioned. i will expect a scientific reply here not gut feeling please. 2. Is it to do with .org domain extension that it should not be with commercial organizations like us Kindly reply at the earliest Regards Aman
Algorithm Updates | | Aman_1230 -
Which domain is better - a Long descriptive or Short Abbreviated?
I want to start a new company and have an option to have a long and descriptive domain or buy out the 5 letter Abbreviated domain for $2000. abstract example:
Algorithm Updates | | NikitaG
LegalMigrationServiceCapeTown.com
V.S.
LMSCT.com The advantage of the shorter domain is that it is 13 years old.
so now for the SEO - which one do you think is better? is Exact Match Domain a better thing for SEO or can I get away with a shorter domain? I can buy both, but which one should I build on as the main domain? any advice would be much appreciated, as well as the PROS & CONS of both.0 -
Does Google use data from Gmail to penalize domains and vice versa?
Has anyone noticed issues with Gmail deliverability and spam inboxing happening around the same time as other large Google updates? For example, if Google blasted your site in Panda or Penguin, have anyone seen them use the same judgement across into Gmail deliverability to blacklist your domain?
Algorithm Updates | | Eric_edvisors0 -
Will Parked Domain hurt My SEO as Duplicate Content?
Hello, I have one website (Migration Lawyers) and I have an extra 8 domains Parked so they are basically cloning the content of the site. so if the main site is: migrationlawyers.co.za and I have an addon domain migration-lawyers.com is that good or bad? is there a proper way to redirect the sites, will redirecting (301) subdomains be more effective? Thanks for your Input 🙂 0i8VXqr.png
Algorithm Updates | | thealika0 -
Why do I have 7 URLs from the same domain ranking on the 1st page?
I have a client that has individual pages for authorized dealers of their product (say "Car Dealers"). When you search for "brand name + location", Google returns 7 "dealership" pages from the parent company's domain as the first 7 results, but there is one that gets pushed off to the 5th page of the SERPs. The formatting of content, geo-targeting, and meta data on the page is identical on every single one. None of them have external links and there is not one extremely distinguishable thing to assess why the one page doesn't get placed on that first SERP. Why is the one getting pushed so far down? I know this may be a bit confusing, but any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Sub-domains and keyword rich domains
Hello All I'm hoping for some opinions as i am confused as to the best action for me to take. The problem:
Algorithm Updates | | jonny512379
Although i say the below, we have never been penalised by Google, not taken part in any bad link building and don't do too bad with SERP. but i worry Google may not like what i do these days. We have one main site that is broken down into areas/cities (i,e London, Manchester, etc) so the domain looks like www.domain.co.uk/London But in addition to this we also use Sub-domains to target popular areas (i,e. http://London.domain.co.uk).
These sub-domains take the content from the main site but of course only display results relevant to London and are optimised for "London + Keyword"
Any page that gets duplicated (i.e London.domain.co.uk/profile123 and www.domain.co.uk/profile123 are ALMOST the same content) we add a rel="canonical" link that points to the main domain+page on www.
All these sites have a large amount of links back to www.domain.co.uk/?Page so the user can also search in other areas other then London, etc. This method has worked well for us and is popular with both users and Google search results. All sites/sub-domains are added to GWT under the same account and all sites have unique sitemaps. I do however worry that Google may class this as link manipulation owing to the amount of links pointing back to the main domain and its pages (this is not the reason we use the sub-domains though) In addition to the above sub-domains we have a few domain names (5/6) that are keyword rich that we also place the same content on (i,e www.manchester-keyword.co.uk would show only content relevant to Manchester), and again these sites have links back to the main domain, so users can navigate other areas of the UK. I worry that these additional domains may also not be liked by Google What do people think? I have started to reduce/replace some of the additional keyword rich domains with sub-domains from the main site and then 301 the keyword rich domain (i.e. www.manchester-Keyword.co.uk now goes to http://Manchester.domain.co.uk) as i feel sub-domains may not be penalised as much as unique domains are.
There are domains that i dont really want to 301 as they bring in good amounts of traffic and users have bookmarked them, etc. Any opinions or what you think i should do would be great, as i really worry that if Google stops giving us good results, i'm in real trouble. Although im not sure if what we do is wrong with Google or not.0 -
Hyphenated Words as Keywords what is spam?
Do you know of any evidence that explains how Google or any SE would handle pages with words that are commonly hyphenate? Our site for example has a large O-ring section. A couple years ago when we did our SEO we used Google's keyword tool and found that these words all have different Cost Per Click, Global / Local searches. O-Rings
Algorithm Updates | | donford
O-Ring
oring
o-ring So we assumed they were each unique keywords and designed our pages to alternate usage of the terms as they are fairly interchangeable. However we have not achieved the position we would have expected from all that work, now while I'm doing another SEO pass with the tools here.. I want to make sure we don't spam them, but still cover all our bases. Thanks for any tips, advice or links.0