Hypen question

[bonjurkes]

Hello,

I am looking for a domain, the title is like My Car.

So mycar.com is registered, so i can get my-car.com

but is it a big deal to have a hypen or not in a domain?

I mean will it have any negative effect for containing a hypen?

[chrisdaniele]

Hyphens are fine. Just don't get carried away. One or two is the most I would do. My beef with hyphens and underscores is more with the marketing aspect. Imagine being on the phone with someone and telling them to go to "w w w my hyphen car dot com." It just sounds a little unprofessional to me, but as far as SEO goes, you won't have any problems.

[Futo]

I always try to get something without a hyphen or hyphens in case a visitor is typing the address in manually but as far as seo goes i dont think there is anything in the rumours about it affecting rankings and suchlike.

[ryukenden]

I would prefer a domain without hypen but for SEO purposes, hypenated domains are okay.

[anawaz]

Like everyone says, its okay for SEO purposes, but is unprofessional. I ran a business in Dubai for one year with a hyphen in my domain name. But that was Dubai...they know about the web as much as my grand dad did.

[ryukenden]

If your purpose is to make money, then hyphenated domains are okay.

[Skinny]

I wouldn't register a hyphen domain if you want a business site for it.

Most traffic from the hyphen name eg. my-car.com goes to mycar.com because most people will forget the hyphen.

Skinny

[dealhunter]

I try not to use hyphens, beacuse when I type in a web address it is kinda irritating to use hyphens. John

[chowbow]

No negative SEO effeect for hyphen, but people can forget the hyphen easily.

[MD.]

My Car is 2 words, for SEO I would say it's better to separate the words with hyphens, for branding no, you will leak customers to the non-hyphen domain. If it's for your company you should have both!

[thinkbig]

I avoid hyphens at all costs when
looking for a new name. I would
rather add another short word then
a hyphen.

[CaliforniaLogic]

Hello and happy Friday from Palm Springs, California.
Logic here.

Ok here is our take on the hyphen easy to buy domain names. While we are equally happy that at least you will be using a domain name that has the .com extension which we think is the most important TLD.

What we would like to share is starting out and starting out in any venture of business, is building the best foundation in the early decision times of your operation.

The domain name is the beginning of any online venture, and you should really go out and buy the actual name you are going to want to have 5 or 10 years out from now. At any price if you truly beleive in your venture then at any cost you must start out as successful in the beginning as you want to end up in the farout future.

Here are some thoughts on why:
You use I-Love-Email-Marketing.com and you are ILove Corp. and you are in the email marketing business as a service. 2 Years from now you have 1000's of clients and you are going to go public, the only thing is you might have avoided this costly issue.
In the beginning stages of going public because you have advisors taking you public and they explaining that going public really you need a domain name that is professional. and the hyphen look is not used by any fortune 1000 corp. today.
So now you have to contact the owner of this domain name and if he is like us or most of us the first thing they are going to do is acces their favorite search engine and see who or what the name brings up.

Once they realize it is the ILove Corp. and they might have read about you going public in the Wall Street Journal the price is going to cost you if they do not redirect the name to a site that features all other email marketing service proivders and are collecting largely from your advertising in both print and online by getting the traffic because you know people are not going to type the HYPHEN into the name most of the time, just like they automatically type in.com out of natural habit.

Now here is why we would not have to worry about the going Public issue probably ever happening.
We all try to SEO/SEM, BLOG, Forum, Back Link, Directory or companies and our products to be popularized however after 15 years of doing this pushing ourselves we realized long ago a combination of the online with real world.

We still have to make calls, run advertisements in print, radio and TV, go to trade shows and industry meetings and siminars and so we are now having to verbally and in print promote you to visit our web site at I-Love-Email-Marketing.com and you are never going to have to worry about going public with hypens in our opinion and from recognizing that we are unable to find a single large company today that has gone forward utilizing the hypen domain name and this is a major part to why they are very available.
We agree thet the easy way to get started is to use these non search engine effected hypens, but we have over 2500 domain names all .com's and we do not own a single hypen name.

Ok sorry for the long winded note but we are reading a lot about non .com domain extensions, hyphens, etc. so we really wanted to share a scenario that we hope will happen to us all.

Thank you,
Logic...

[firezz]

ya true.. how about, www.mycarrs.com, instead ?

[Spyros]

Nope. Certainly a bad idea. Misspelled domains may be a good source for a small, but stable income from ads, but they're definitely a no-no for professional websites.

Why don't you go for a branded domain? It's no more difficult to register one than generic names. Think of it.

P.S.: Never post a domain you want to register on forums. Someone may grab them.

[C.Whyte]

Originally Posted by Spyros

P.S.: Never post a domain you want to register on forums. Someone may grab them.

I was going to post something about that! Even searching for domain names can be risky (such as Godaddy searches for availability) as there are bots that get a hold of frequent searches and register them... it's happened to me before and it's not a good feeling