HatchLLC

The goal of this article is to debate whether or not it’s better to have dashes in your domain name, Google was used for our testing

Click to see a bigger image

From left to right words search - Cheese, pizza, dogs, cats, drums, kids, horses, computers, furniture and car. There are 10 results for each word. You can see in the second row, the amount of domains displayed that have dashes in them for that keyword. The third row displays the position of the domain that has the dash. For our example, we only used first page results. This illustration shows that out of these 10 search terms and 100 results (10 results per search) there are 3 with dashes. Thats not such a good number for those who think you should put dashes in your domain name.

I thought to be fair to those who like dashes in their domains that I should take it a few steps further and search for 2 and 3 word keywords.

Click to see a bigger image

From left to right, cheese pizza, pizza cook, dogs running, cats fighting, playing drums, kids playing, horses pictures, computers fix, buy furniture and buy car. To my surprise, searching for 2 word terms did not yield any domains with dashes in them. So that is 100 more results with ZERO dashes in their domain name. It’s not looking good for those who are a fan of dashes in the domain name.

Okay, now is when I would expect to see some dashes in the domain names, with a 3 word keyword.

Click to see a bigger image

From left to right - make cheese pizza, how cook pizza, watch dog running, our cats fighting, see playing drums, kids playing games, baby horses picture, computers fix spyware, buy furniture online online and buy car online. 2 results out of 100 are domains with dashes in them.

I searched random words, I started with 1 word and recorded the results. That is this first grouping of search terms. Each search term gives 10 results on Google. In all fairness, I thought it would be important to search 2 and 3 word terms also since we are hunting for domains with dashes.

I was thinking about something also, when someone tells me that a domain with dashes is better. I think they could be misunderstanding .htaccess with apache and the concept of a mod-rewrite. Anything after the .extension would not be part of the domain name, rather a page or an article name. It’s an example of a search engine friendly URL, not a domain name. I am mentioning this so my readers can be on the same page with me while reading the rest of this article.

An example of a search engine friendly URL would be http://hatchllc.net/find-products/ Doh! Looks a dash, but guess what? That’s not the domain name, its part of the URL and it makes all the difference in the world. Let’s move on since we have this established now.

Taking the data from below, out of 300 domains listed for my keyword searching only 8 of them had dashes. Guess what? Google does not prefer domains with dashes.

BOTTOM LINE - It’s all about the hard links you have to your site. I once took a site to the top of 65 Million results and the domain had nothing to do with they keyword. How did I do it? I released a free theme for people to use but the agreement was they had to give me a link back to my site. Even though these numbers point to having a domain name without a dash, speaking from my own experience (13 years now) it’s all about the links to your site.

So many things can be debated when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is nothing that I take personally when someone disagrees with me. Just know, its a debate and that’s it. I would love to get some comments going and other peoples input on the subject.