Keri,

You never cease to be able to recall the good stuff. Funny, its been a busy week so am just getting to some of this. Great post here, thanks.

OK, Miriam, you have got to stop this! I only have so many thumbs!

Excellent,  super excellent info. I absolutely did not know this. I owe you a bottle of wine, glass of beer, diet soda, coffee any or all. I hope Robert-o has seen it as it is great.

I am wearing my Miriam rocks t-shirt today!

Best

I would just really have to see the test and the data. Here is the issue as I see it:

First, someone who already knows the name of the site and is going there is a given they are ok with it. They are not searching for it per se (even though many still use search to go to a site), so CTR would be a given.

So, we are speaking of those searching for a given product. Let's say Oatmeal Cookies.

Assuming someone created Almond Oatmeal cookies and there were two people selling them: One bought the Almond-Oatmeal-Cookies.com domain and the other bought the AlmondOatmealCookies.com domain.

If I am the searcher for these cookies my friend, Doug, just PM'd me about, am I going to click on AlmondOatmealCookies.com if it is ranked third over the hyphenated version at two or four? Are most people going to do that for that one reason? I just have a hard time grasping that, but I learned a long time ago that in marketing never assume people are like you.

This also may be one of those that EGOL talks about where it is dealing with the minutiae of SEO that has very little impact on the result. I would allow that your CTR issue is the first time someone has made me think more about the issue. The, its spammy, argument is just not thought out enough for me.

As usual, all the best to you and yours!

Hey Doug, 
Gianluca had answered a question a long time ago using these and I could not find the question again after a 30 min search. Thanks,

Gianluca's point was that Google did not see hyphens as spam and not to worry about it as I recall.

I would personally use hyphens if there was a domain I wanted that was unavailable and the hyphenated version was. If I wanted it, I would obviously believe I had the ability to rank for it in the likelihood someone used the non hyphenated.

I was wondering, is there a nonexpertsexexchange.com?? I can understand getting a discount for having a novice over an expert, but this seems extreme;)

Best

JMarch

Not sure which provider you are using, but I just pulled up a client site and with four buttons (Twit. FB like, FB share,Plus one) we are pulling 112.8 after gzip. Before gzip we get 354.5kb.

If you could provide a bit more info, we will try to assist.

Best

C Nature Travel

There are a lot of people who wonder about this. First, many of us thought the past year would show a real decrease in exact match domain name strength for SEO and I don't know that it has really changed that much. As to any value, there are simply two opinions: One group says it looks spammy the other says that it is easier to read.

We do SEO/SEM and WebDev/Design for clients. We have clients who have hyphens and those who don't and we do not see any appreciable difference. Frankly, as to "domain value" I do not really think there is a difference for a basic term. If it were branded it might be a bit different. If you have concerns as to value, buy both and 301 one to the other (your call as to which you have it finally resolve to).

In my opinion, neither has more SEO value. It is really up to you and your client. I like the hyphens for readability but, hey, I wear glasses.....

Have fun,

Info in the listing itself. So, make sure you have not used keyword stuffing or added city names in categories, etc. Then make sure you have 10 photos and several videos, etc. I always geotag photos, etc. Get some good shots of the storefront/office. Two or three at least.

best

Very well put. (As usual) Thanks so much,

David, hopefully you will see EGOL's reply. Best of luck.

EGOL,

You make a great point. My question is this: David says above that: None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.

I think his assumption is that by changing the url's to something (that appears to be from his example) more query oriented and optimized he will be able to impact this. Given that and given that a 301 will transfer 90% plus of the link juice, do you think he is served in making the change?

Curious as I respect your opinions.

David,
First, as to your last sentence, I am assuming you are redirecting 20 urls that are "not optimal" to 20 new urls that are optimized. Such that your example above is one and another would be http://www.dog.com/food to http://www.dog.com/organic-raw-dog-food, etc. for approximately 20 urls.

If these follow the best practices (301's url to url in the .htaccess file) you should have no issue with the change. Understand that if the "poor" url /toys is ranking number 8 on page 1 of Google, and you do the redirect, it does not mean that you will rank for /chew-toys in the same place. For a short while you will likely continue to rank and then likely will fall off quickly.

Your new page will gain the link juice but not the ranking of the old.

We do a lot of site redesigns to bring them to SEO and CRO standards and therefore use a lot of 301's to maintain PA and grow it. We typically see the juice move over two to three months or more in a gradual fashion. An example is a site that we transferred every url for in late Aug. had about 170 links to its home page. Two months later, when looking at the old url there were only a couple showing and the links were showing on the new. So, it will change but not overnight.

Hope this helps

If you do not want to have two pages, one singular and one plural, I would set up my SEO for the one with the most queries if I thought I could handle the competition and rank for the term. If I felt I would have more chance of ranking and converting with the lesser queries, I might set it up for that.

One way I look at this is to do broad and exact match to see what the difference is on each term. As an exact match (see Andrew's response) Custom cases gets more than double the queries, but the broad match custom case wins 165K to 135K. My guess is that I would go with custom cases and I believe I would be served up more times in broad match. Just IMO.

With either case, I would also insure there was the opportunity to rank for both by including say an H2 on the secondary, etc. (also use that keyword within context in the page).

You, obviously, could set up two pages if you felt one would not dilute the other. I always worry about dilution on plurals though.

Best