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How much does a hyphen matter in your domain name and does it affect SEO?
Hi everyone, new member in this subreddit. New to the SEO game, but how much does a hyphen in your domain name affect SEO? I’ve had this domain registered since 2015 (using it as a portfolio site, not until recently I want to convert it into a blog), if you search my first and last name on Google, my website ranks top 5 on the first page result. Should I even bother registering for a new domain name that has no hyphen in it?
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15 Replies
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It doesn’t impact anything.
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hypen in domainnam matters in seo, it impacts readability, which show out a spammy behaviour. Mostly you will not be having decent visibility on search engines. But still if you increase trust, putting out quality & unique content through your website and feed it to google.eill help mostly I say it depends rather than saying it hurts.
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I always discourage any characters in url as well as anything but .coms . I imagine having to telling someone your domain name and want it to be as easy possible. Check my site Ilikecats.com. Versus check out my site, I dash likecats . Net
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Let me preface this with the fact that I don’t know the answer to this question and I’m not an SEO expert, I just have some basic understanding of it. But what’s interesting about the comments to this post (and sub), and why I’m convinced that the majority of so-called SEO experts are full of shit, is that the two comments you got are COMPLETELY the opposite. Like every other commenter in this sub is a con artist just pretending to know what they’re talking about. That’s what I’ve gathered from reading this sub for over a year now
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I think the hyphen makes it harder to tell people your URL to be honest. I don’t think google pings you, but then again, who knows google’s mind? I just live by the rules of keeping it simple and you should be good.
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Makes no difference. Domain names (aside from the tld after the full stop, ie the .com, .ie, .co.uk) bit are not worth thinking about in terms of SEO.
Thought experiment – what is one of the most competitive search terms you can think of? Put it into Google. Do any of the top results use exact match keyword domains? Does the domain name seem to have any relevance to their pagerank at all? Nope.
However as other people mentioned, an easy-to-repeat domain name matters in terms of other marketing options and a hyphen isn’t helpful when you’re verbally telling someone your domain. Which is rare.
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It impacts your branding, people being able to get to you via branded queries.
So while it does have a correlation, it does not impact DIRECTLY. For instance, if you were already extremely famous, it would change anything. -
Well think of it this way – are there any respected or well known brands you know of that have a hyphen?
Genuine question.
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It seems generally that nobody can say irrefutably that it’s a negative or positive, but most advanced seo suggests avoiding hyphens. It struck me when I started buying expired domains and participating in auctions how domains with hyphens aren’t anywhere near as sought after or perceived as valuable.
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It’s harder to tell people what to enter in the address bar. Also a domain having special characters in it will sell for less. I read it on GoDaddy once.
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Hello! I’m an SEO in a pretty niche field, but in my experience and reading, hyphens don’t appear to affect search ranking in any negative sense. They do make urls harder to remember, though. So, if you want people to be able to easily share and remember your URL, then you might have a user experience problem. If you are concerned about that, then my recommendation would be to buy another domain and redirect it to the old one.
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Doesn’t matter
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I don’t think it matters to Google. Hyphens just make it a little more difficult to tell someone your URL.
In your case, I would probably get both domain names and redirect one to the other.
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It doesn’t matter! I remember asking the same question 1 year ago for my new website. So I bought domain name with hypen and now my website ranks 1st in its niche with 40.000+ traffic
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Yes, of course hyphen matters in your domain name, and it also affects your SEO, but there is no harm or let me be very clear it does not harms your SEO rankings, rather it becomes very easy for the Search Engine Crawlers/Bots to understand the meaning of your URL, so that Bots can easily guess what is there in the Page.
As you know it’s not possible to use < Space> in the domain name or URL so putting hyphen is the best way to make it easy for the Search Engines Crawlers/Bots to understand about your Web Page of course this will also increase your Organic Rank in case your competitors are doing doing so, you can take the advantage, even if they are doing so, you can protect yourself from getting outcompeted in terms of Organic Rankings.
If you feel any difficulty in doing SEO of your website you can contact us, we will provide you with more information, if required !
Thank You
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