Hyphenated Domain Names

Posted by Edwin Lynch on April 4, 2008 in Search Engine Optimisation

I recently looked into buying a hyphenated domain name for a client, but before doing so, I did a little research. It seems that the only real disadvantage is when the domain name is read aloud. One hyphen is usually fine but if there’s more than one, there’s a lot of repetition and some explanation of the word “hyphen” over the phone and in radio ads.

Indeed, if you only have one hyphen such as in “www.domain-names.com”, Google will treat the hyphen as a space – which might actually work well with reagrds to search engine rankings.

Further reading:

• http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol6/promo_no19.htm
• http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/domainname.shtml
• http://ezinearticles.com/?The-truth-about-hyphenated-domain-names&id=50146