Hyphens are the way to go!

[gemstar]

My blog on hyphens. Hyphens are the way to go. Not because I own some but it makes sense. If you were to look up say ZXY.com in whois you would see it has 0 relevance to the seo score. If you type GO-C.com it has 100%. We all heard the bad vibes of hyphens. So what! The reality is the keyboard was designed with a hyphen for a reason and thus it is relevant as any other key. When someone types in ZXY.com (I apologize for the use of this domain for example) but the end user still has to type ZXY.com. They still have to type the “.” In most cases to get to the website so what’s stopping them to type a “-“as well? In the end as domains diminish more and more people will look to alternative ways to promote their sites. They wont regester a 10-20 or 30 char domain just to avoid the hyphen but it will be part of everyday use. Why would a domain be classified as 100% relevant with a hyphen if it were not? That’s what I have to say. Hyphens are the way to go for short domains for the future. :tu:

Be gentle!! :wave:

 

[buckshotdots]

I have always liked the hyphen (or not afraid of it). I guess its the next big thing as well because of value. They get the same idea across at a discount price. With huge prices for LLL.com's (rightfully so) and since soooo many are developed people look for 'other avenues'. I think L-LL's etc will take off nicely in the next 2 years. I love E-XX or I-XX ones as its one of the closest things to a 2 letter (WAAAAY UNDERVALUED IMHO).

g-

 

[gemstar]

:bingo:

 

[Krossat]

how do you like my Image-Gallery dot com?
You think it has the potential to be a premium even with the hyphen??

 

[Angela C]

gemstar

As I read your blog on the misunderstood hyphen, I G-L-O-W with pride. If anyone gives you any C-R-A-P about the hyphen, I'll be in your corner.

 

[Rubber Duck]

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics.

Alexa has come out in recent weeks and admitted it stats are a load of horse shit. Why do these stats sound any more credible?

 

[gemstar]

how do you like my Image-Gallery dot com?
You think it has the potential to be a premium even with the hyphen??

I guess it can be a winner if you promote right.
I remember way back in 2002 when I was on board on a collection site for books. I mentioned a taboo that it would be accepted in the future and was flamed like you would not believe. A few years later they said who would have thought?
My point is you have to have a vision of the future and what makes sense, if it does your usually right.

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics.

Alexa has come out in recent weeks and admitted it stats are a load of horse shit. Why do these stats sound any more credible?

Check
http://whois.domaintools.com/
Not Alexa

gemstar

As I read your blog on the misunderstood hyphen, I G-L-O-W with pride. If anyone gives you any C-R-A-P about the hyphen, I'll be in your corner.

I think you will. Thanks! :great:

 

[Traveler]

Hyphens have value just like .net has value. The problem with both of them is you will leak traffic to the .com non-hyphen version.

 

[raredn.com]

Hyphens have value just like .net has value. The problem with both of them is you will leak traffic to the .com non-hyphen version.

Very Well Said,

I never thought of it like that before, .net and hyphen are similar, they will both leak traffic to the non hyphen .com

Would rep you but I have too recently it says

That aside, I did go on a bit of a hyphen buying spree early this year! Including buying Hyp-hen.com

 

[Michael]

I don't mind a hyphen if it makes sense, but I think neo said it best.

 

[npcomplete]

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics.

Alexa has come out in recent weeks and admitted it stats are a load of horse shit. Why do these stats sound any more credible?

First of all, I posted something here just recently where I was basically saying that Alexa is nothing more than a worthless toy, so in that sense I totally agree with you. There is quite simply no correlation whatsoever between the toy statistics quoted by Alexa and anything showing up in my logs, as explained in my recent post.

I would be interested in getting a link to the Alexa admission that their stats are worthless, since that would be the first signs that there is something meaningful coming out of Alexa (namely an admission that their stats are crap).

Now, along different lines, I think you will also agree that in scripted languages like Arabic that the hyphen can be quite useful in keeping the characters from joining and assisting in readability.

The hyphen also helps in ascii wrt readability, especially in cases where you have the last letter of the first word being the same as the first letter of the second word. For valuable keyword combinations I would suggest buying both, and I have both hyphenated and unhyphenated pairs going back 12 years... and yes that doubles the cost. I believe that it adds value when you explain to a potential buyer that you have already protected them against traffic bleed or confusion with the hyphenated version.

 

[Rubber Duck]

Alexa have not actually said their stats are crap. What they have said is that they intend changing their model so it is not entirely dependent on the Alexa Tool bar, which skews the results heavily towards what American Geeks are looking for (actually they didn't quite put it like that either). Whilst many of may be Geeks, we don't want market surveys that just reflect this narrow spectrum. Alexa is totally worthless for Asia in general and IDN in particular.

My point, however, is not to knock Alexa, but it is to underline the inherent fallibility of many of the statics we rely on. Even Google will often return only a third of the results it generated the previous day. My repost to 100% SEO releveance for hyphenated names, where the hyphen is not breaking up words is B-O-L-L-O-C-K-S. Also have you notice how domainers generally present these in upper case but you have to toggle the shift on and off between characters to do that which make it a real feat of co-ordination.

Here is one version of the Alexa Story.

http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s5i34262

First of all, I posted something here just recently where I was basically saying that Alexa is nothing more than a worthless toy, so in that sense I totally agree with you. There is quite simply no correlation whatsoever between the toy statistics quoted by Alexa and anything showing up in my logs, as explained in my recent post.

I would be interested in getting a link to the Alexa admission that their stats are worthless, since that would be the first signs that there is something meaningful coming out of Alexa (namely an admission that their stats are crap).

Now, along different lines, I think you will also agree that in scripted languages like Arabic that the hyphen can be quite useful in keeping the characters from joining and assisting in readability.

The hyphen also helps in ascii wrt readability, especially in cases where you have the last letter of the first word being the same as the first letter of the second word. For valuable keyword combinations I would suggest buying both, and I have both hyphenated and unhyphenated pairs going back 12 years... and yes that doubles the cost. I believe that it adds value when you explain to a potential buyer that you have already protected them against traffic bleed or confusion with the hyphenated version.

 

[npcomplete]

Thanks RD! The Alexa toolbar was just *one* of the problems I had with Alexa. The problem is that it is a major source of sampling error... for example it skews statistics towards the "geeks" that use the toolbar, which introduces a categorical error in sampling. I will definitely take a look at the link.

Another major source of error is that it does not correctly sample dynamic content that backlinks to a site, for example embedded dynamic content on other sites that links back to your own site (as the source of the dynamic content). I guess the problem is that a lot of people cite Alexa stats as if they are somehow meaningful, without really understanding the way they generate their stats, or the possible sampling errors that are introduced by their sampling techniques. As a math geek I am especially sensitive to "bad math", and when I look at Alexa I see bad math in abundance.

Thanks again for the link!

 

[Rubber Duck]

The thing that always made me laugh was the way they claimed to track everything around the Globe, when they could not even be arsed to translate their site into other languages. How deluded was that!

 

[gemstar]

Good posts! Keep em coming! :wave:

Hyphens have value just like .net has value. The problem with both of them is you will leak traffic to the .com non-hyphen version.

Good post. However I think that they have MORE value than .NET even though it leaks traffic. Its still traffic and it's a .com

Traffic is not the main issue here its about the available names, brandable short nice names. That is the main topic. End users will find their own way to obtain traffic through advertising.

 

[ecalc]

Traffic may not be the main issue in this thread but it will always be the elephant in the room when discussing domain investments/values. Domains with no inherent sustainable (type in) traffic will always face pricing pressure from the infinite supply of unregistered names. Targeting "brandable short nice" names is a way to narrow the infinite competition, but the definition and population of "brandable short nice" broadens over time to suit the needs of late arrivals.

Regarding hyphens, I recommend expired two word generic hyphenated dot com names with backlink traffic. They can be found at one year PPC multiples. When backlinks dry up you still have a meaningful name at little or no cost.

 

[Dougy]

I'm not sure whether it's true or not, however, I have heard that domain-names.com (domains of that style) are registered by Google as two words?

 

[Rob J]

I don't mind hyphens, in fact I rather like them simply because everyone else seems to hate them. There's very little competition and I often catch excellent hyphenated names as they drop. I think many people focus strictly on non-hyphenated dictionary word .coms which leaves a lot of gems for the people who do look through everything.

 

[gemstar]

:notme:

 

[bricio]

hyphens will become totally necessary in the years to come

i am not talking about traffic or seo but about internet itself; hyphens are the best alternative when you dont have what you want to reg in any other gTLD (.com, .net, .org and .info) and sometimes it can be better than all of them but .com, if the name, for some reason, doesnt fit very well another extension than .com

internet penetration is now 21% and it is growing everyday; i dont want to imagine when it is in 40%... imagine the famous supply X demand for names and try to guess what is going to happen and i am not talking just about short names here

geo names will show how hyphens will be accepted, a name with hyphen will always have its value lesser than those without it but the hyphen wont hurt the name severely at all

in regards to short names (until 5 characters) everybody knows, even who is not a domainer the potential a small name or an acronym has
we are seeing LLL.com sales and the chepaest ones are going for about $10,000 (sometimes there are bargains); i would like to know how much they will be in 10 years ($xx,xxx or $xxx,xxx for "bad" ones, if there is "bad" ones, who knows?)

so, it is obvious hyphens are here to stay, like it or not
as i said before, we can like hyphens or not but domaining can be a good way to make money if we predict the moves, accept them and take some risks but sometimes people mix feelings with businesses and then they lose a great chance to make a nice ROI