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.
Using hyphenated sub-domains or non-hyphenated sub-domains? What is the question! I Any takers?
-
For our corporate business level domain, we are exploring using a hyphenated sub-domain foir a project.
Something like www.go-figure.extreme.com
I thought from a user perspective it seems cluttered. The domain length might also be an issue with the new Algorithm big G has launched in recent past.
I know with past experience, hyphenated domains usually take longer to index, as they are used by spammers more frequently and can take longer to get out of the supplementary index.
Our company site has over 90 million viewers / year, so our brand is well established and traffic isn't an issue. This is for a corporate level project and I didn't have the answer!
Will this work? anyone have any experience testing this. Any thoughts will help!
Thanks, Rob
-
I agree - it was Google itself that suggested hyphenating keywords in url's.
Example - I was just using the Moz keyword tool on a site named sellmybusinesscolorado.com. The search term it was tuned to was "sell business colorado". The tool, and so likely the bots, did not recognize those very words in that long URL. Had it been hyphenated - they would have been recognized.
What brought me here was - is hyphenating, itself, non kosher in a sub domain? Thomas, coincidentally - the subdomain I was pondering is pest-control.straza.com. He is a business broker that sells a lot of pest control businesses. I also would do medical.straza.com. These subs will deal with their namesakes as if they were the only businesses they sell.
Google recognizes the hyphen as the universal word separator. I stopped using underbars ten years ago - a nasty habit I learned from programmers.
I think it is more the ABUSE of a good thing, as it always is, that should be avoided.
........... I didn't name that site, by the way ;-]
-
I agree (FWIW)
-
There will be no SEO fall out due to hyphen.
It's a personal preference.
I like: footballsport.mysite.com
I don't like: football-sport.mysite.com
No hyphen just seems to be more common. Users may get confused only upon remembering the subdomain. "uh... I think there is a silent hyphen in that URL...??? Or was it no hyphen?"
So if you use football-sport.mysite.com then redirect footballsport.mysite.com to football-sport.mysite.com.
-
Thanks. It was a little of both in terms of concerns. I didn't want indexing issues, and the hyphen just threw me off - as well as it impacting the usability of the page. As long as they hyphen will work in the sub-domain I'm good to go. I didn't want any issues later
Thanks to all who replied! -
I suppose that we're not understanding your concern. Is the concern over incorporating a keyword or is the question about whether a hyphen has negative consequences?
If it's a keyword issue you can use keyword.example.com or key-word.example.com. No difference from an SEO perspective. It's more about convenience/usability (ease of conveying the address via various media).
I doubt that one dash will cause indexation/ranking issues. I don't see this as an issue.
-
this is actuallly for the sub-domain, not the primary domain.
so football.mysite.com as opposed to something like football-sport.mysite.com
It's the hyphen that's throwing me out of whack..
Ideas? and thanks for the insights~!!
-
Sorry - should have said "not very friendly!"
-
You shouldn't experience any problems with a hyphen in the domain name. Exact Match domains seem to rank better, but most likely not directly associated with the exact match but the domain history and content. Even with a hyphen you get a close match. I have seen hyphen domains rank just fine.
The only concern I would have is consistency within the domain name. You may throw of users by adding a hyphen to an unhyphenated domain. Personally I would opt against using the hyphen. People have learned to read through domain names at this point.
If you do go with the hyphen make sure you redirect the unhyphenated version to the hyphenated version.
-
I agree. I'm still on the fence about the hyphenated sub-domain. I can't find too many sites that actually practice this technique. i'm looking for some references online.
This domain won't be spoken over the phone, and from a usability perspective, but very flashy r friendly.
I wanted to use something like say football.mysite.com instead of football-sport.mycompany.com
i'm still perplexed!! LOL
-
Avoid multiple hyphens (eg key-word-stuffed-subdomain.example.com). Your example only has one-not a concern. The SEs are able to read domains/subdomains with spacers or not. Not a concern there either. In the example you've provided, the issue is more about usability. If you ever have to speak a URL over the phone it'll be much easier 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
-
Should we use Cloudflare
Hi all, we want to speed up our website (hosted in Wordpress, traffic around 450,000 page views monthly), we use lots of images. And we're wondering about setting up on Cloudflare, however after searching a bit in Google I have seen some people say the change in IP, or possible sharing of Its with bad neighbourhoods, can really hit search rankings. So, I was wondering what the latest thinking is on this subject, would the increased speed and local server locations be a boost for SEO, moreso than a potential loss of rankings for changing IP? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tiromedia1 -
How can you promote a sub-domain ahead of a domain on the SERPs?
I have a new client that wants to promote their subdomain uk.imagemcs.com and have their main domain imagemcs.com fall off the SERPs. Objective? Get uk.imagemcs.com to rank first for UK 'brand' searches. Do a search for 'imagem creative services' and you should see the issue (it looks like rules have been applied to the robots.txt on the main domain to exclude any bots from crawling - but since they've been indexed previously I need to take action as it doesn't look great!). I think I can do this by applying a permanent redirect from the main domain to the subdomain at domain level and then no-indexing the site - and then resubmit the sitemap. My slight concern is that this no-indexing of the main domain may impact on the visibility of the subdomains (I'm dealing with uk.imagemcs.com, but there is us.imagemcs.com and de.imagemcs.com) and was looking for some assurance that this would not be the case. My understanding is that subdomains are completely distinct from domains and as such this action should have no impact on the subdomains. I asked the question on the Webmasters Forum but haven't really got anywhere
Technical SEO | | nathangdavidson2
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/1Avupy3Uw_o/hu6oLQntCAAJ Can anyone suggest a course of action? many thanks, Nathan0 -
URL Structure On Site - Currently it's domain/product-name NOT domain/category/product name is this bad?
I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
Clients domain expired - rankings lost - repurchased domain - what next?
Its only been 10 days and i have repurchased the domain name/ renewed. The who is info, website and contact information is all still the same. However we have lost all rankings and i am hoping that our top rankings come back. Does anyone have experience with such a crappy situation?
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
<sub>& <sup>tags, any SEO issues?</sup></sub>
Hi - the content on our corporate website is pretty technical, and we include chemical element codes in the text that users would search on (like S02, C02, etc.) A lot of times our engineers request that we list the codes correctly, with a <sub>on the last number. Question - does adding this code into the keyword affect SEO? The code would look like SO<sub>2</sub>.</sub> Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Jenny10 -
Correct linking to the /index of a site and subfolders: what's the best practice? link to: domain.com/ or domain.com/index.html ?
Dear all, starting with my .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | inlinear
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.inlinear.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://inlinear.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://inlinear.com/ [R=301,L] 1. I redirect all URL-requests with www. to the non www-version...
2. all requests with "index.html" will be redirected to "domain.com/" My questions are: A) When linking from a page to my frontpage (home) the best practice is?: "http://domain.com/" the best and NOT: "http://domain.com/index.php" B) When linking to the index of a subfolder "http://domain.com/products/index.php" I should link also to: "http://domain.com/products/" and not put also the index.php..., right? C) When I define the canonical ULR, should I also define it just: "http://domain.com/products/" or in this case I should link to the definite file: "http://domain.com/products**/index.php**" Is A) B) the best practice? and C) ? Thanks for all replies! 🙂
Holger0 -
How to 301 multiple domain names to a single domain
Hey, I tried to find and answer to this seemingly simple question, but no luck. So, I have one domain name with a website attached to it. I also registered all the other domain names that are similar to it or have different extensions - I want to redirect all the other domain names to my one main domain name without getting penalised by the big G. It looks like this: www.mainsite.com - this is my main domain I also have www.mainsite.com.au, www.mainsite.org, and www.mainsite.org.au which I all want to just redirect to www.mainsite.com I have been told that the best way to do this is a 301 redirect, but to do that you need to make a CNAME for all the other domains that points to www.mainsite.com. My problem is that I cannot seem to create a CNAME record for http://mainsite.com - I have it working for http://www.mainsite.com but not the non www record. What should I be doing differently? Is it just my DNS provider is useless? Thanks, Anthony
Technical SEO | | Grenadi0 -
Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
Technical SEO | | sboelter0