Hyphens in keywords
-
Anyone know if hyphens affect the SEO value of keywords?
So is:
Sandwich-making course
Worse than:
Sandwich making course
I'm talking about in titles and body text.
I already know that too many hyphens is a bad idea in URLs and domain names.
-
Thanks for your reply!
-
Thanks for responding!
-
We use hyphens and non-hyphen keywords for seo. We have used it for quite some time and we have seen no negative effects.
-
Hyphens are generally used by search engines as word separators so IMO they don't hurt and they don't help.
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
-
URL Indexing with Keyword
Hi, My webpage url is indexed in Google but don't show when searching the Main Keyword. How can i index it with keyword. It should show on any SERP when the keyword is searched. Any suggestions.
Technical SEO | | green.h1 -
Curious Keyword Tags Question...
In 2012, we got hit with something... I have always assumed Panda... We have hundreds of thousands of products on our site. Prior to the traffic drop, our old site design listed a small number of keywords tags on the product pages. About 10 or so... After the site re-design, we allowed all of the keyword tags to appear on these product pages and also linked them to our search results pages. I know that one thing this did is cause a lot of these Search Results pages to be indexed. But our traffic has been constantly declining since then... I wonder what would happen if I just went back to the old with a smaller number of keywords listed and not linked? Any thoughts? Thanks! Craig
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
Why is either Rogerbot or (if it is the case) Googlebots not recognizing keyword usage in my body text?
I have a client that does liposuction as one of their main services, they have been ranked in the top 1-5 for their keywords "sarasota liposuction" with different variations of the words for a long time, and suddenly have dropped about 10-12 places down to #15 in the engine. I went to investigate this and actually came to the "on-page analysis" tool for SEOmoz pro, where oddly enough it says that there is no mention of the target keyword in the body content (on-page analysis tool screenshot attached). I didn't quite understand why it would not recognize the obvious keywords in the body text so I went back to the page and inspected further. The keywords have an odd featured link that links up to an internally hosted keyword glossary for definitions of terms that people might not know directly. These definitions pop up in a lightbox upon clicking the keyword (liposuction lightbox screenshots attached). I have no idea why google would not recognize these words as they have the text in between the link, yet if there is something wrong with the code syntax etc. it might possibly hender the engine from seeing the body text of the link? any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you so much! Phn2m Phn2m.png bWr5K.png V36CL.png
Technical SEO | | jbster130 -
Hyphen in URL
Hi, I would like to know if the following statement holds true today or it doesn't matter whether we use hyphens or underscore If you have a URL like keyword1_keyword2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for keyword1_keyword2 ( highly unlikely ) . But If you have a URL like keyword1-keyword2, that page can be returned for the searches - keyword1,keyword2 and even “keyword1keyword2” Thanks
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Keyword cannibalisation
We created a product blog page that was highly optimized for SEO based on a recommendation from a colleague. These are now our best performing pages - however they do not convert as highly as the bona-fide product pages. After further investigation we're concerend that we shouldn't have split our content accross two pages - keyword cannibalisation. Is this correct and should we 301 our product blog pages to the other high converting pages?
Technical SEO | | JohnHillman0 -
Keywords
Hi All, If I had a site about a cartoon character (for example). When I add keywords to the 'keywords' meta tag, would I be best to put specific phrases such as Cartoon Character, Cartoon Character on TV, Cartoon Character on Television or would the following have the same effect: Cartoon Character, Tv, Movie, Television I was wondering if having the above instance might be less effective as the search engines might read TV, Movie, Television as less relevant to Cartoon Character. Hope that makes sense! 🙂
Technical SEO | | wedmonds0 -
Long tail keywords and duplicate content (product description)
Hi <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> pro's, how are you doing these days? Hope everything is fine... Let's get down to business: I've got a little question about ecommerce sites with duplicate content (product descriptions). I'm already ranking top #1 for exact keyword matche's (did a lot of backlink work with exact keyword). That's fine. The question is: long tail keywords still getting lower results than the competitors, because they published the content first. How to beat them? What I need to do/work to outrank competitors on long tail keywords? (I really need this because almost keywords/products from my niche only have 10% of exact search's). Hope someone can give me a word of light on this! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | azaiats20 -
Accidently did a 301 redirect on root domain and lost domain keyword position
I just bought a domain about a week ago and instantly ranked number 4 for for my keywords with the domain keyword bonus. I created a landing page off the root of my domain while I'm building out my main site. I accidentally did a 301 redirect instead of a 302 from my root to my landing paging and this resulted in me losing my position and only being about to find my domain in the google if I searched for my domain specifically. Anyway to regain my original position? I have removed the redirect. Have I been put in the sandbox?
Technical SEO | | JohnTurner790