Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does a dash in your domain name effect your ranking?
-
Does a dash in your domain name effect your ranking? or it dosen't really matter?
-
I would say it doesn't matter unless of course you are having a domain like www.this-is-my-colourful-nice-seo-friendly-website.com.
We use ours to say -online.com just to seperate it out. However our new domain doesn't have one in and we have two words together.
As long as you have something people can search on or recognise I think it will be ok.
-
Hi.
According to me dash doesn't affect your ranking but it use for separating two words ya category for example www.domain.com/seo-affiliate.php. Over here dash is used for saperating this two words. Search engine algorithms are advanced enough to identify two separate words without a space so no need to put dash. If your domain name is too long then you can use dash because, i thought domain names with dashes were less memorable than domain names without. If you decide to use a hyphenated domain, use the hyphens to separate your keywords where needed. By using dash in your domain names you are able to retain your original choice and also keep the keyword in its exact order but people sometimes forgot to type dash when there are looking for particular website so there is chance to losing visitors. So don't use dash in your domain is batter for ranking and traffic purpose.
-
I think it gets a bit spammy when you have 2,3 or more dashes in a domain name, the only reason you'd need that many is to make a super keyword rich domain name.
-
No it doesn't matter. If it's an Exact Match, Search Engines still see it as one, with or without the dash.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Domain name suffix impact on SEO
Hello there, We are about to launch a new website and were wondering what impact a specific suffix would have from an SEO point of view. We were thinking about going for a domain which ends in .london as oppose to .com We are based in London and sell world wide via our website. We are suggesting www.domain.london as oppose to www.domain.com I would appreciate your views... Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roberthseo0 -
Domain Authority: 23, Page Authority: 33, Can My Site Still Rank?
Greetings: Our New York City commercial real estate site is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. Key MOZ metric are as follows: Domain Authority: 23
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Page Authority: 33
28 Root Domains linking to the site
179 Total Links. In the last six months domain authority, page authority, domains linking to the site have declined. We have focused on removing duplicate content and low quality links which may have had a negative impact on the above metrics. Our ranking has dropped greatly in the last two months. Could it be due to the above metrics? These numbers seem pretty bad. How can I reverse without engaging in any black hat behavior that could work against me in the future? Ideas?
Thanks, Alan Rosinsky0 -
Weird 404 URL Problem - domain name being placed at end of urls
Hey there. For some reason when doing crawl tests I'm finding pages with the domain name being tacked on the end and causing 404 errors.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jay328
For example: http://domainname.com/page-name/http://domainname.com This is happening to all pages, posts and even category type 1. Site is in Wordpress
2. Using Yoast SEO plugin Any suggestions? Thanks!0 -
Is it safe to redirect our .nl (netherlands) domain that we have just purchased to our .com domain?
Hi all! We've recently developed a German version of our website with German translation and now we have just purchased a .nl domain, but with this one, we want all of the copy to remain in English. Is it ok to redirect our .nl domain to our current .com website or will this give us bad SEO points? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donaldsze0 -
Is it safe to 301 redirect old domain to new domain after a manual unnatural links penalty?
I have recently taken on a client that has been manually penalised for spammy link building by two previous SEOs. Having just read this excellent discussion, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience I am weighing up the odds of whether it's better to cut losses and recommend moving domains. I had thought under these circumstances it was important not to 301 the old domain to the new domain but the author (Lewis Sellers) comments on 3/4/13 that he is aware of forwards having been implemented without transferring the penalty to the new domain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience#jtc216689 Is it safe to 301? What's the latest thinking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ewan.Kennedy0 -
Is it worth switching from .net to .com if you own both domain names
For over 20 years the company I work for has used www.company.net as their TLD, because we could not register www.company.com at that time. However, currently we also own www.company.com www.company.com has a 301 re-direct to www.company.net We are a global company, and market leader in our industry. Our company name is associated with the product we make, and our competitors use our company name as their targeted keywords to attract visitors to their sites because our company name is synonym with the product we and they make. As we are a global company we also have lots of TLDcc's. The email address of all our employees worldwide have a .net email address extension. Would you advice switching from www.company.net to www.company.com??? And if so, what would be the reasons for this switch. Would it only be for branding purposes? Looking forward to some insights before taking on such an invasive switch (because of the switch of all email addresses of employees worldwide). Best regards, Astrid Groeneveld
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cordstrap0 -
Domain expiration and seo
My domain name is free with my service with yahoo but it expires every year and gets extended automatically as I continue service, how does this impact my seo efforts? I've heard that the search engines prefer sites to expire in 3 years or more? Is this a fact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Could ranking problem be caused by Parked Domain?
I've been investigating a serious Google ranking drop for a small website in the UK. They used to rank top 5 for about 10 main keywords and overnight on 24/3/12 they lost rankings. They have not ranked in top100 since. Their pages are still indexed and they can still be found for their brand/domain name so they have not been removed completely. I've coverered all the normal issues you would expect to look for and no serious errors exist that would lead to what in effect looks like a penalty. The investigation has led to a an issue about their domain registration setup. The whois record (at domaintools) shows the status as "Registered and Parked or Redirected" which seems a bit unusual. Checking the registration details they had DNS settings pointing correctly to the webhost but also had web forwarding to the domain registrar's standard parked domain page. The domain registrar has suggested that this duplication could have caused ranking problems. What do you think? Is this a realistic reason for their ranking loss? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc20110