Using hyphenated sub-domains or non-hyphenated sub-domains? What is the question! I Any takers?
-
For our corporate business level domain, we are exploring using a hyphenated sub-domain foir a project.
Something like www.go-figure.extreme.com
I thought from a user perspective it seems cluttered. The domain length might also be an issue with the new Algorithm big G has launched in recent past.
I know with past experience, hyphenated domains usually take longer to index, as they are used by spammers more frequently and can take longer to get out of the supplementary index.
Our company site has over 90 million viewers / year, so our brand is well established and traffic isn't an issue. This is for a corporate level project and I didn't have the answer!
Will this work? anyone have any experience testing this. Any thoughts will help!
Thanks, Rob
-
I agree - it was Google itself that suggested hyphenating keywords in url's.
Example - I was just using the Moz keyword tool on a site named sellmybusinesscolorado.com. The search term it was tuned to was "sell business colorado". The tool, and so likely the bots, did not recognize those very words in that long URL. Had it been hyphenated - they would have been recognized.
What brought me here was - is hyphenating, itself, non kosher in a sub domain? Thomas, coincidentally - the subdomain I was pondering is pest-control.straza.com. He is a business broker that sells a lot of pest control businesses. I also would do medical.straza.com. These subs will deal with their namesakes as if they were the only businesses they sell.
Google recognizes the hyphen as the universal word separator. I stopped using underbars ten years ago - a nasty habit I learned from programmers.
I think it is more the ABUSE of a good thing, as it always is, that should be avoided.
........... I didn't name that site, by the way ;-]
-
I agree (FWIW)
-
There will be no SEO fall out due to hyphen.
It's a personal preference.
I like: footballsport.mysite.com
I don't like: football-sport.mysite.com
No hyphen just seems to be more common. Users may get confused only upon remembering the subdomain. "uh... I think there is a silent hyphen in that URL...??? Or was it no hyphen?"
So if you use football-sport.mysite.com then redirect footballsport.mysite.com to football-sport.mysite.com.
-
Thanks. It was a little of both in terms of concerns. I didn't want indexing issues, and the hyphen just threw me off - as well as it impacting the usability of the page. As long as they hyphen will work in the sub-domain I'm good to go. I didn't want any issues later Thanks to all who replied!
-
I suppose that we're not understanding your concern. Is the concern over incorporating a keyword or is the question about whether a hyphen has negative consequences?
If it's a keyword issue you can use keyword.example.com or key-word.example.com. No difference from an SEO perspective. It's more about convenience/usability (ease of conveying the address via various media).
I doubt that one dash will cause indexation/ranking issues. I don't see this as an issue.
-
this is actuallly for the sub-domain, not the primary domain.
so football.mysite.com as opposed to something like football-sport.mysite.com
It's the hyphen that's throwing me out of whack..
Ideas? and thanks for the insights~!!
-
Sorry - should have said "not very friendly!"
-
You shouldn't experience any problems with a hyphen in the domain name. Exact Match domains seem to rank better, but most likely not directly associated with the exact match but the domain history and content. Even with a hyphen you get a close match. I have seen hyphen domains rank just fine.
The only concern I would have is consistency within the domain name. You may throw of users by adding a hyphen to an unhyphenated domain. Personally I would opt against using the hyphen. People have learned to read through domain names at this point.
If you do go with the hyphen make sure you redirect the unhyphenated version to the hyphenated version.
-
I agree. I'm still on the fence about the hyphenated sub-domain. I can't find too many sites that actually practice this technique. i'm looking for some references online.
This domain won't be spoken over the phone, and from a usability perspective, but very flashy r friendly.
I wanted to use something like say football.mysite.com instead of football-sport.mycompany.com
i'm still perplexed!! LOL
-
Avoid multiple hyphens (eg key-word-stuffed-subdomain.example.com). Your example only has one-not a concern. The SEs are able to read domains/subdomains with spacers or not. Not a concern there either. In the example you've provided, the issue is more about usability. If you ever have to speak a URL over the phone it'll be much easier without the dash.
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
-
Blogging on multiple domains
We have three different domains for geotargeting (za,uk and .com). Each site at at the moment has the same content with only country specific details changed like currency etc. What is the best way to get maximum SEO benefit when posting new content.When we post new content should we repost to all three domains (the same content) or will Google only index the url on the domain which is crawled first. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | aquaspressovending0 -
Redirect typo domains
Hi, What's the "correct" way of redirecting typo domains? DNS A record goes to the same ip address as the correct domain name Then 301 redirects for each typo domain in the .htaccess Subdomains on typo urls still redirect to www or should they redirect to the subdomain on the correct url in case the subdomain exists?
Technical SEO | | kuchenchef0 -
Questions about root domain setup
Hi There, I'm a recent addition to SEOmoz and over the past few weeks I've been trying to figure things out. This whole SEO process has been a bit of a brain burner but its slowly becoming a little more clearer. For awhile I noticed that I was unable to get Open Site Explorer to display information about my site. It mentioned that that there was not enough data for the URL. Too recent of a site, no links, etc. Eventually I changed the the URL to include "www." and it pulled up results. I also noticed that a few of my page warnings are because of duplicate page content. One page will be listed as http://enbphotos.com. The other will be listed as http://www.enbphotos.com. I guess I'm not sure what this all means and how to change it. I'm also not really sure what the terminology even is and something regarding root domain seemed appropriate but I'm not sure if it is accurate. Any help/suggestions/links would be appreciated! Thanks, Chris
Technical SEO | | enbphotos0 -
Domain Forwarding Help
A friend of mine is a domainer and he wants to forward 21 parked niche specific domains to my site for extra type-in traffic. This will turn out to be 30 extra hits a day. Obviously, since these are parked domains, the SEO benefits are none, we just want the traffic. My questions is how to do it. These are his parked domains, and will not be redirected forever, is a 302 redirect the best plan here? He planned on just going into his hosting/domain admin and selecting "forward domain" -- is this ok too? Also, he would prefer to forward these domains to a single domain he owns, and then forward that single domain he owns to my domain. So someone who types in one of these 21 domains will go typindomain.com ---> hisredirectsite.com ---->mysite.com any implications here? What is the best option and how to do it? Thanks
Technical SEO | | terran0 -
Parking Domains
I currently have a website domain.com.au, an American branch of the company who own domain.com are currently having their site built and want to forward there domain.com to domain.com.au while construction is taking place. Are there any negative effects to parking the domain.com on my domain.com.au? What is the best method to do this without causing any problems for my domain.com.au?
Technical SEO | | Pork0 -
Blog question
If i set up a blog like this - http://www.abccompany.com/blog ? ( in a folder ), will each link to http://www.abccompany.com/blog carry more value to the main site than if the blog were set up like this- http://www.blog.abccompany.com
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Non primary domain ranking higher in searches
Hey Guys, Hopefully I can explain this so that you can understand, let me know if you need me to clarify any particular points. I have a primary domain for my website, however someone has also pointed their domain at my server that has nothing to do with us or our website. Typing a keyword in a search engine will list our website as this has been crawled but it's listing the domain as their domain and not our primary. Is this because their domain has greater value then our primary? What's the best course of action to resolve the issue? The reason I ask is because the domain could potentially have a negative effect on business. If I setup hosting for this second domain and setup a redirect on it, all the traffic that is trying to reach us via respective search terms are then directed away from our site. I have been in contact with the domain administrator but they are yet to reply to my correspondence. Has anyone experienced something similar and come up with a good way to resolve it? Thanks guys, any help would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | digitalclubb0 -
URL Structure Question
Hey folks, I have a weird problem and currently no idea how to fix it. We have a lot of pages showing up as duplicates although they are the same page, the only difference is the url structure. They seem to show up like: http://www.example.com/page/ and http://www.example.com/page What would I need to do to force the URLs into one format or the other to avoid having that one page counting as two? The same issue pops up with upper and lower case: http://www.example.com/Page and http://www.example.com/page Is there any solution to this or would I need to forward them with 301s or similar? Thanks, Mike
Technical SEO | | Malarowski0