Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Url with hypen or.co?
-
Given a choice, for your #1 keyword, would you pick a .com with one or two hypens? (chicago-real-estate.com) or a .co with the full name as the url (chicagorealestate.co)?
Is there an accepted best practice regarding hypenated urls and/or decent results regarding the effectiveness of the.co?
Thank you in advance!
-
Hi Joe, this is for sure an awesome question, so many different point of views, the problem I see with .co is this one:
"Sites with country-coded top-level domains (such as .ie) are already associated with a geographic region, in this case Ireland. In this case, you won't be able to specify a geographic location."
Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=62399
So if I understand this correctly, and you want to target real estate clients in the Chicago area (which I love and will be there for the U2 concert on July 4th) and over US/worldwide, a .co domain is probably not the way to go here.
There has been a lot of talk about .co (TLD for Colombia), same as .ws, supposedly "WebSite", actually West Samoa, so I would advice to make the obvious, look at your competitors, does anyone has a .co domain and are ranking in Chicago? are any of the top 100 results anything but .com? try different keywords just to check if there are any .co sites ranking in the real estate market.
Hope that helps!
-
Thanks for the feedback. Thats the beauty of SEO. The only way to figure out what is the most effective is to try multiple ways and measure. Then, as soon as you get it and have a conclusion, the rules change...
-
At the risk of getting a bunch of thumbs down, between the choices you have specifically asked, I am going to throw in with the .co.
I think the issue is going to be how you promote the site, where you host it and where you get your links from.
If you host it in the USA and build a solid local link building campaign no one is going to have any trouble figuring out where you should be relevant. least of all the major search engines.
The other concern would be when someone tries to type in your url directly. However, There will be a tendency to automatically add an "m" to the end. But will that be any more of a problem then trying to get people to put a hyphen in the right place?
If people really find your site helpful, they'll just bookmark it in my experience.
-
Trust me when I say that I didn't think of the .co because of the Super Bowl ad.
I have heard mixed results on the .co but really haven't seen it in search results but I dont see to many hyphenated urls either. Maybe I will just add a word to the .com? -
They had an ad in the superbowl, I've heard from 5 different clients about if they should buy the .co after that.
-
This link might help as well...
-
Completely disagree with you Korgo the average user doesn't even know there is a .co TLD that exists.
They have been available for a while, I spend a lot of time online through work and play and have never seen a site using one so not sure why you think they will take off if they haven't already despite virtually ever domain seller pushing them heavily last year.
-
I agree with James and would aim for one hyphen on the .com TLD. I did some unscientific user testing in this area and one hyphen was fine, 2 or more was a turn off for the user.
The same users expected a site to be .co.uk (I'm in the UK) or .com and some were confused by the existence of different TLD's wondering where the .co.uk or .com was and thinking the URL might not work without them.
-
I would pick hypenated over anything but .com. I would nt even use .net - .org is the only one I would consider for a true non-profit organisation.
I have some hyphenated domains for ecommerce websites, and have found no big problem with them personally. Of course go with non-hyphenated .com's if you can!
-
I don't like hyphens, but I don't like foreign domain extensions even more (Columbia!) despite what they say about it meaning "company", no, no. They pulled the same stunt with .me it's not on.
It depends how competitive the niche is and how much you want it. I have a feeling EMD won't be as strong in the coming months for long tail searches like this, but for now I guess it will give you the edge, what I'm trying to say is if you don't like the domain don't go with it, follow what you feel is most logical, as that is probably best for long term SEO success.The EMD benefit is nowhere near the same (in my exp) with hyphenated or foreign domains, don't get me wrong they are a benefit, but a .com, .org or net will always outrank (for now).
So in response to your question, If I was you I would buy them both (so comp. can't steal em' later), make them both blogs and get a nice brand-able domain for your business, use the two blogs as feeders for your business.
-
Thanks for your reply.
-
Thanks! I figured two hyphens wouldn't be a good idea but it's sure tempting.
-
According to the book The Art of SEO, my personal SEO bible, if you're not concerned with type-in-traffic, branding or name recognition, you don't need to worry about this. However to build a successful website long term you need to own the .com address and if you then want to use .co then the .com should redirect to it. According to the book, with the exception of the geeky, most people who use the web still assume that .com is all that's available or these are the domains that are most trustworthy. So don't lose traffic by having another address!
-
Hi Joe,
I wont go after 2 hyphens, usually if the .com is not available i go after a .net.
But in your case, i would go with a .co
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
-
All URLs in the site is 302 redirected to itself
Hi everyone, I have a problem with a website wherein all URLs (homepage, inner pages) are 302 redirected. This is based on Screaming Frog crawl. But the weird thing is that they are 302 redirected to themselves which doesn't make any sense. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alex_goldman
https://www.example.com.au/ is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/ https://www.example.com.au/shop is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses Have you encountered this issue? What did you do to fix it? Would be very glad to hear your responses. Cheers!0 -
Help with facet URLs in Magento
Hi Guys, Wondering if I can get some technical help here... We have our site britishbraces.co.uk , built in Magento. As per eCommerce sites, we have paginated pages throughout. These have rel=next/prev implemented but not correctly ( as it is not in is it in ) - this fix is in process. Our canonicals are currently incorrect as far as I believe, as even when content is filtered, the canonical takes you back to the first page URL. For example, http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html?ajaxcatalog=true&brand=380&max=51.19&min=31.19 Canonical to... http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html Which I understand to be incorrect. As I want the coloured filtered pages to be indexed ( due to search volume for colour related queries ), but I don't want the price filtered pages to be indexed - I am unsure how to implement the solution? As I understand, because rel=next/prev implemented ( with no View All page ), the rel=canonical is not necessary as Google understands page 1 is the first page in the series. Therefore, once a user has filtered by colour, there should then be a canonical pointing to the coloured filter URL? ( e.g. /product/black ) But when a user filters by price, there should be noindex on those URLs ? Or can this be blocked in robots.txt prior? My head is a little confused here and I know we have an issue because our amount of indexed pages is increasing day by day but to no solution of the facet urls. Can anybody help - apologies in advance if I have confused the matter. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HappyJackJr0 -
Sitemap generator which only includes canonical urls
Does anyone know of a 3rd party sitemap generator that will only include the canonical url's? Creating a sitemap with geo and sorting based parameters isn't the most ideal way to generate sitemaps. Please let me know if anyone has any ideas. Mind you we have hundreds of thousands of indexed url's and this can't be done with a simple text editor.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | recbrands0 -
Double hyphen in URL - bad?
Instead of a URL such as domain.com/double-dash/ programming wants to use domain.com/double--dash/ for some reason that makes things easier for them. Would a double dash in the URL have a negative effect on the page ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
How to set up 301 redirect for URL with question mark
I have encountered some issue with 301 redirect and htaccess file. I need to redirect the following url: http://www.domain.com/?specifications=colours/page/3 to: http://www.domain.com/colours The 301 redirect command I wrote in htaccess file is as follow: Redirect 301 /?specifications=colours/page/3 http://www.domain.com/colours And it doesn't work at the moment. What is the correct way to set up 301 redirect here? Your help will be sincerely appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robotseo0 -
Canonical URLs and Sitemaps
We are using canonical link tags for product pages in a scenario where the URLs on the site contain category names, and the canonical URL points to a URL which does not contain the category names. So, the product page on the site is like www.example.com/clothes/skirts/skater-skirt-12345, and also like www.example.com/sale/clearance/skater-skirt-12345 in another category. And on both of these pages, the canonical link tag references a 3rd URL like www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. This 3rd URL, used in the canonical link tag is a valid page, and displays the same content as the other two versions, but there are no actual links to this generic version anywhere on the site (nor external). Questions: 1. Does the generic URL referenced in the canonical link also need to be included as on-page links somewhere in the crawled navigation of the site, or is it okay to be just a valid URL not linked anywhere except for the canonical tags? 2. In our sitemap, is it okay to reference the non-canonical URLs, or does the sitemap have to reference only the canonical URL? In our case, the sitemap points to yet a 3rd variation of the URL, like www.example.com/product.jsp?productID=12345. This page retrieves the same content as the others, and includes a canonical link tag back to www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. Is this a valid approach, or should we revise the sitemap to point to either the category-specific links or the canonical links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 379seo0 -
Brackets in a URL String
Was talking with a friend about this the other day. Do Brackets and or Braces in a URL string impact SEO? (I know short human readable etc... but for the sake of conversation has anyone relaised any impacts of these particular Characters in a URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AU-SEO0 -
Blocking Dynamic URLs with Robots.txt
Background: My e-commerce site uses a lot of layered navigation and sorting links. While this is great for users, it ends up in a lot of URL variations of the same page being crawled by Google. For example, a standard category page: www.mysite.com/widgets.html ...which uses a "Price" layered navigation sidebar to filter products based on price also produces the following URLs which link to the same page: http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=1%2C250 http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=2%2C250 http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html?price=3%2C250 As there are literally thousands of these URL variations being indexed, so I'd like to use Robots.txt to disallow these variations. Question: Is this a wise thing to do? Or does Google take into account layered navigation links by default, and I don't need to worry. To implement, I was going to do the following in Robots.txt: User-agent: * Disallow: /*? Disallow: /*= ....which would prevent any dynamic URL with a '?" or '=' from being indexed. Is there a better way to do this, or is this a good solution? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewY1