Will hyphens in my domain name have a negative impact on my SEO?
-
.
-
.
-
No problem, glad I could help. I am in these Q&A forums to make sure people get their questions answered, so please let me know if you have any more.
-
Alex,
I watched that Webinar and it was REALLY informative. I have a full page of notes and to-do's now that I think will help us really build our brand. Thanks for the suggestion!
-Alex
-
.
-
Not a problem, let me know if there is anything else I can help you with, or if you have any other questions.
-
.
-
.
-
A few thoughts on that Alex.
The first is, don't set up that redirect! In short it won't help you, for reasons such as potential duplicate content, confusing to visitors, and you'll have to choose where to link to...
If you own the original .com, then this is where your main efforts should lie. Directories, happy customers, and industry blogs will be more inclined to link to your companys site if it feels more legit.
Depending on the keyword difficulty, focus on making some linkbait content, be it a free online calculator or tool, or a free PDF download, or just some standard infographis and try distributing all of this content to relevant niche sites and social media.
In answers to your questions then;
1. Hyphens in this case will not have a negative effect on your URL. I believe Google will start clamping down on hyphenated keyword rich domains, as shown by the recent google branding serps update, but the timescale and effectiveness of this is unknown.
2. Don't go the extra mile and 301 the domain, unless you're keen on building links to both sites it's simply not worth it, focus on your main domain and optimise the landing pages for your keywords.
Solar Monster
-
No hyphens will not hurt your seo. That is you won't lose ranking because you have hyphens. But it does look a little spammy and people maybe less likely to click on domains with hyphens.
Yes hypehsn will help if they are in the domain. Mainly becasue when someone links to your domain like rich-keywords.com - the keywords are already in the anchor text. But I also advise away from going after keyword rich urls, they look spammy. Webmasters will also be less likely to get back to you on link requests and partnerships.
I recommend you stay with your company domain and try to optimize that. It also makes sense to have your company name in the url.
-
Hey Alex,
First off, nice name
Anyways, hyphens have shown to not be of any benefit in the search engines. It has really been exact match domains (with no hyphens) that have done the best. It won't negatively impact you, but it won't help either.
What I would do is focus on building a brand. In a recent blog post by Rand here, he had a presentation going over ranking factors and it has been concluded that exact match domains don't have as much importance as they used to.
I would focus on building a brand. If you look at the SERPs today, you will see that brands are continuing to show up, as they have trust with the users, which that is what Google is looking for.
Now to become a brand in Google's eyes was covered in a PRO webinar, which you can find here. This will ultimately be the best solution for you.
That's my opinion, let me know what you think by replying to me.
I look forward to hearing from you.
-Alex
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
-
EMD and dot CO domains
This may be a basic question for some. I would like to get opinion of SEO experts on EMD and .co domains. I understand from what I have read that exact match domains have less value nowadays but they still have some value, that's what I seem to be sensing from experts. So I wanted to know how .co domains are viewed in term of SEO. And can an exact match .co domain have a better opportunity against another domain which is not an EMD if all other things are equal?
Algorithm Updates | | RyanUK0 -
Is using REACT SEO friendly?
Hi Guys Is REACT SEO friendly? Has anyone used REACT and what was the results? Or do you recommend something else that is better suited for SEO? Many thanks for your help in advance. Cheers Martin
Algorithm Updates | | martin19700 -
Domain Migration Question
Lets say there is a brand that has one primary product type at different optional tiers. (Think something like SMB/Enterprise/Individual) Lets also say that 1 year ago this brand migrated from having everything under 1 domain (Domain A) to moving 2 of their product tiers to another domain (Domain B), a new domain. They have done some initial SEO work on this domain and had a pretty successful migration but it has also been decided that they are going to no longer offer one of these product tiers and they intend to eventually migrate everything back under the 1 domain (Domain A) They just are not sure whether they should do this now or later.
Algorithm Updates | | DRSearchEngOpt
During this next year or so there is also going to be some likely re-branding/design, etc...stemming from this decision, on the domain, meaning content changes and all that fun that goes into a migration/re-design/re-branding strategy. The timing of this has not been fully decided on. Here is the question: Should they a) Migrate back to Domain A first and then do the re-design or b) Keep 2 separate domains for now, figure out the re-design/re-branding, make content changes and then migrate Site A over in a year or so after all changes have been made? My concern with option a) is that they migrated a little less than 1 year ago and will be migrating back which I feel could have a negative impact on the content and the domain. The positive side I see here is that this impact could be just as large even if we waited so doing this now might be a better, more efficient use of our time if we can migrate and make content changes fairly close together or concurrently.
My concern with option b) is that the tier they no longer offer makes up the majority of that sites business and traffic, leaving us with not much in terms of content that ranks well and garners much traffic. Trying to optimize for the remaining product tier by itself on it's own domain could be quite hard and then having to migrate it in a year or so back to Domain A could negatively impact any small organic impact I can make on applicable pages/domain. Does anybody have any input here? I am leaning towards Option A and but wanted to get some other opinions. Thanks Everybody! Edit: So far, this has received a lot of views but no input. I am hoping to have a bit of a dialog on this so any ideas or input is welcome.0 -
Is Moz Domain Authority still relvant when it comes to Google ranking?
My understanding of Moz DA is that it is predominantly based on external links. Since Penguin I am noticing more and more websites ranking high in Google with a "low" number of links and certainly a low DA but quality and relevancy of content and also of offering. I understand that there was always more to ranking than DA but is it anymore even relevant to how a site will rank in Google?
Algorithm Updates | | halloranc0 -
How local is local SEO?
If I manage get a client ranked for a localised organic search term on a county level. For example: "keyword - West Midlands" or "keyword - Hertfordshire" How high will the website rank for all the cities and districts within that county? I am going to give this a go but I was wondering if anyone else has had any experience with this?
Algorithm Updates | | Adnan.Hassan.Khan0 -
Content on Wordpress blog inside the main website for SEO
Hi, We have our main website and our blog on blog.practo.com. Now what I see is that we wish to write in content to grow our seo keywords and links. Should we put the blog as www.practo.com/blog and then begin writing all the content or we should put the wordpress blog as www.practo.com/(wordpress blog here) and then begin writing the content. For best practices I suppose we should have content lined up as www.sitename.com/category/article name etc or www.sitename.com/article name etc - am I correct? Our main site consists of few html pages and then we have our software on a different sub domain. What are the best ways to publish content and get it crawled at a faster rate for growth? I would also wish to understand how to measure the number of growth in % to our content we are writing. Only via google analytics or some other tool? Say I wish to see the growth of 10 articles from month of may and compare it to the month of april or march 2012. So what tools could I use to see if we are progressing or not? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | shanky10 -
Does my overly dynamic website hurt my SEO?
I have heard from a couple of people that my overly dynamic URL's hurt my SEO tremendously. Can anyone verify that? Of course my provider says it doesn't matter but I take what they say with a grain of salt. Another thing, my web crawls show a TON of errors for duplicate page title and overly dynamic url and duplicate page content. How big of a deal is this? http://www.nvclothing.com
Algorithm Updates | | sviohl0 -
Google changing the casing in SERPs of our domain name in Title tag!
I've added NOODP and NOYDIR metas to our pages... but Google is still somehow showing the correct title tag that is on the page, but is changing the CASING of the | Domain.com portion. In some instances, they are still showing a different title tag all together. Why would they be ignoring the <title>tag on the page and placing an uncased version of our domain name at the end?</p> <p> </p> <a download="MxQjo" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://imgur.com/MxQjo" target="_blank">MxQjo</a></title>
Algorithm Updates | | CareerBliss0