is a hyphen ok in a domain? Advantages? Disadvantages?

Hi Guyp,

I don't think there is a black and white answer to that question.

My short answer is: if it's an otherwise strong domain the hyphenated version can be good for development but I wouldn't say it will have strong resale on the aftermarket.

Ash.

This question has been asked plenty of times and everyone will have an opinion.

I have a few hyphenated domains, and here's my opinion:

- Fine for a site that will be relying on search engine traffic.
- Crap for a site that is relying on anything other than search engine traffic.

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SMSF

No, save your money and buy more expensive non hyphenated names. Hyphenated names dont sell well and are still available to register many times for obvious reasons

I have never typed in real-estate.com.au but I often have typed realestate.com.au for example. ask yourself a simple question how can I advertise my website on the radio.

How does it sound and is it easy to remember would you advertise and say "real hypen estate.com.au" on your radio ad.. not likely?

I guess it depends how good the domain is. Using the example above, I would love to own the domain real-estate.com.au!

But I also owned financial-planners.com.au which I thought was good, and it struggled to get $100 at the Netfleet auction. I don't know now how much financialplanners.com.au would be worth, but it would be many many times more than the hyphenated version sold for.

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SMSF

As mentioned already, fine if your only source of traffic is going to be organic/ppc.

I have a few from when I first started but now I prefer to go with a prefix or suffix.

Example:

CheapKeyword.com
KeywordBlog.com

It sucks out most of the value and confuses people, personally I would be trying to avoid using them as much as possible. As stated by others you'll be limited to SEO stuff in a practical sense, other wise it will be confusion central for users.

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if i had moviez.com would you say thats good?

And how many people advertise On the radio anyway?


I find hyphenated names ok for small sites. My highest earning Adsense Site is NT-TOURISM.com
Relevance is always the best criteria for any name.
And OK for larger sites if the hyphen is actually part of the actual word or phrase
(Yes , There are some Compound English words / phrases that have hyphens. like ECO-Friendly)

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Managing Million Dollar Sites since 2004

I cant for the life of me rank my hyphen sites as well as my joinned words . Just my personal opinion however I prefer the joinned domains. Example L

Launched two sites www.buyboxesonline.com.au

and www.buy-boxes.com.au

Search engines took www.buyboxesonline.com.au and ran with it

Anyways just my imput , Cheers

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