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.
Should i not use hyphens in web page titles? Google Penalty for hyphens?
-
all the page titles in my site have hyphens between the words like this: http://texas.com/texas-plumbers.html
I have seen tests where hyphenated domain names ranked lower than non hyphenated domain names. Does this mean my pages are being penalized for hyphens or is this only in the domain that it is penalized?
If I create new pages should I not use hyphens in the page titles when there are two or more words in the title?
If I changed all my page titles to eliminate the hyphens, I would lose all my rankings correct? My site is 12 years old and if I changed all these titles I'm guessing that each page would be thrown in the google sandbox for several months, is this true?
Thanks mozzers!
-
John Mueller from Google has mentioned that there is no penalty or demotion for using a hyphen. However, be careful you're not keyword stuffing.
-
In that example, there is not a hyphen in the domain name, only in the page name. A hyphen in the domain name would look like:
-
You can use either. Google looks at hyphens like a space. I think it makes more sense to use piping (|) for your page titles, as that is more common, although I don't think there is a penalty for either. Below is a link to Matt Cutts blog for using different punctuation in URLs, I would imagine the same applys to page titles.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
and from the webmaster tools blog:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/cBikmAXlXXoHope this helps! I would worry more about the structure and keywords than the separator characters.
-
I would say use hyphens in the urls. I've never known there to be a ranking difference and in my opinion it's a best practice to use hyphens over underscores or plus symbols, and for readability for the user I think hyphens make sense. texas-plumbers reads easier than texasplumbers to a user, and for Google I would think it's easier to discern. Imagine some titles where words could make completely different sentences by separating them at different locations. http://www.boredpanda.com/worst-domain-names/ as some examples.
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
-
I am Using <noscript>in All Webpage and google not Crawl my site automatically any solution</noscript>
| |
Web Design | | ahtisham2018
| | <noscript></span></td> </tr> <tr> <td class="line-number"> </td> <td class="line-content"><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=errorPages/content-blocked.jsp?reason=js"></td> </tr> <tr> <td class="line-number"> </td> <td class="line-content"><span class="html-tag"></noscript> | and Please tell me effect on seo or not1 -
Incorporating Spanish Page/Site
We bought an exact match domain (in Spanish) to incorporate with regular website for a particular keyword. This is our first attempt at this, and while we do have Spanish speaking staff that will translate/create a nice, quality page, we're not going to redo everything in Spanish page. Any advice on how to implement this? Do I need to create a whole other website in Spanish? Will that be duplicate content if I do? Can I just set it up to show the first page in Spanish, but if they click on anything else it redirects to our site? I'm pretty clueless on this, so if anything I've suggested is off-the-wall or a violation, I'm really just spit-balling, trying to figure out how to implement this. Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Body of text on category pages
Hello everyone, wonder if I can pick your brains about our company's website. We are a tea company - Canton Tea Co. We have been advised that it is really important to get more text onto the category pages on our website, as otherwise the page just consists of a list of products, and therefore provides Google with a ton of headers, tiny descriptions, and not enough text to allow the page to being easily indexed, therefore hurting our Google ranking for key search terms like 'Green Tea' which should lead to the Green Tea category page. So we decided to add some text to the category page. The only place for this text to go was laid over the category header image. However, it looks pretty awful and unsophisticated having this text on top of the image - please see an example, our Green Tea category page, via this link: http://www.cantonteaco.com/loose-leaf-tea-1/type/green-tea.html So I have three questions: How significant is the text on a category page such as this to that page's Google ranking? If we moved the text to an area that was hidden until clicked on, for example the 'Filter by' section that opens up when you click on it (see via URL above), would that negate the SEO benefit? Do you have any other ideas or opinions on how to resolve this? Thank you! Louise, Canton Tea Co.
Web Design | | Cantonteaco0 -
Reasons Why Our Website Pages Randomly Loads Without Content
I know this is not a marketing question but this community is very dev savvy so I'm hoping someone can help me. At random times we're finding that our website pages load without the main body content. The header, footer and navigation loads just fine. If you refresh, it's fine but that's not a solution. Happens on Chrome, IE and Firefox, testing with multiple browser versions Happens across various page types - but seems to be only the main content section/container Happens while on the company network, as well as externally Happens after deleting cookies, temporary internet files and restarting computer We are using a CMS that is virtually unheard of - Bridgeline/Iapps Codebase is .net Our IT/Dev group keeps pushing back, blaming it on cookies or Chrome plugins because they apparently are unable to "recreate the problem". This has been going on for months and it's a terrible experience for the user to have. It's also not great when landing PPC visitors on pages that load with no content. If anyone has ideas as to why this may be happening I would really appreciate it. I'm not sure if links are allowed, by today the issue happened on this page serversdirect.com/dm/geek-biz Linking to an image example below knEUzqd
Web Design | | CliqStudios0 -
Does an age verification home page hurt SEO?
There's a microbrewery in our area that just launched its first website. It has the "verify your age" homepage (which is not really their homepage, but I don't know what it's called) before you can enter. It looks like this: http://angrychairbrewing.com/ Anyway, does this hurt them at all from a rankings standpoint? Also, assuming bots/spiders/ROGER can crawl sites like this, (which I think they would have to be able to do) how do they get around this verification? Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Can external links in a menu attract a penalty?
We have some instances of external links (i.e. pointing to another domain) in site menus. Although there are legitimate reasons (e.g. linking to a news archive kept on a separate domain) I understand this can be considered bad from a usability perspective. This begs the question - is this bad for SEO? With the recent panda changes we've seen certain issues which were previously "only" about usability attract SEO penalties, but I can't find any references to this example. Anyone have thoughts / experience?
Web Design | | SOS_Children0 -
Page Size
Hello Mozers, What is the best page size ( or the max page size ie KB ) for a home page or a 2nd level page. Thank you - I appreciate you looking at this question. Vijay
Web Design | | vijayvasu0 -
Landing pages vs internal pages.
Hey everyone I have run into a problem and would greatly appreciate anyone that could weigh in on it. I have a web client that went to an outside vendor for marketing. The client asked me to help them target some keywords and since I am new to the SEO world I have proceeded by researching the best keywords for the client. I found 6 that see excellent monthly searches. I then registered the .com and or .net domain names that match these words. I then started building landing pages that make reference to the keyword and then have links to his site to get more info. My customer sent the first of these sites to the marketer and he says I am doing things all wrong. He says rather then having landing pages like this I should just point the domain names at internal pages to the website. He also says that I should not have different looks for the landing pages from the main site and that I should have the full site menu on each landing page. I wanted to here what everyone here has to say about the pros and cons of the way to do this cause the guy giving the advice to me has a lower ranking site then I do and I have only started working on getting my site ranked this year. He has atleast according to him been doing this forever. Thanks, Ron
Web Design | | bsofttech0