Hyphens in domain names and URLs
Are hyphens in domain names and URLs are a bad idea if you want to do well in Google?
Michael Campbell in his article The Real Truth about Hyphens in Domain Names had a useful suggestion for finding out if hyphens in domain names or URLs have a bad effect on search engine ranking. This was:
- "Look and see!"
He observed that domain names with hyphens in them do really badly in Google, and recommended:
- "Stay away from hyphenated domain names".
But I took his advice, and had a look-see. I took one of my favourite keywords, which is ranking well on MSN. Unfortunately, it is nowhere on Google. For obvious reasons, I won't go public on what this keyword is. But it is of the form:
I created the following table. It shows the number of times 1, 2, 3, or 4 hyphens showed up in the top thirty SERPs on a search for red widgets in the MSN and Google search engines.
| Hyphens in URL | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| Number (MSN) | 4 | 2 | 0 | 1 |
| Number (Google) | 3 | 3 | 0 | 2 |
Both engines showed roughly the same number of hyphenated URLs. This included several domain name in both engines (not shown in the table). So Michael Campbell's hypothesis appears to be wrong. In his defence, he does say the algorithms are constantly changing. Hyphens may be back in fashion. But they might go out again next week!
So the fact that my red-widgets page did well in MSN, but badly in URL does not (at first sight) seem to be a fault of the hyphens. There are as many hyphenated sites doing well in Google as there are in MSN. So it is likely to be something else about my page that is causing problems. Maybe the repetition of widgets in the URL? The experiments continue.
I will not be doing anything so radical as changing the URL to get rid of hyphens. But I am planning to stop using hyphens for future URLs. The next widget file be:
This will give me more data for analysing the hyphen/no-hyphen argument; and, as every Star Trek fan will tell you, there is nothing better than more data.