When are hyphens preferred in a domain name?

[tabrez]

Domainers, as far as I have seen, always run away from domains with hyphens. Hyphen is a part of the English language.

Hyphens surely decrease the value of domain when they are merely used to separate the words in the domain and of course when the non-hyphen version is already taken.

But there are cases, where hyphens are used in natural written English. A very good example is de-addiction (deaddiction is wrong). In such cases, should the hyphen not increase the domain's value?

Please also tell me if there are other cases where adding a hyphen increases the domain value.

Thank you.

 

[biggie]

Domainers, as far as I have seen, always run away from domains with hyphens. Hyphen is a part of the English language.

:talk:

not all domainers discriminate against

Hyphens surely decrease the value of domain when they are merely used to separate the words in the domain and of course when the non-hyphen version is already taken.

But there are cases, where hyphens are used in natural written English. A very good example is de-addiction (deaddiction is wrong). In such cases, should the hyphen not increase the domain's value?

Please also tell me if there are other cases where adding a hyphen increases the domain value.

Thank you.

don't think that is the best example for use of hyphen, because it's not a term used in every day convo.


also, i don't think there many cases where adding a hyphen will increase a domains value, as is.

though in some scenerios, one could add a hyphen to a two or more word domain, and hope it gets type-in traffic....then it has value based on earnings.


or if you develop a domain with hyphens, the SE's may rank it close to or even above the non hyphen.....depending on the content.
or may rank below the .com but higher than the .net/org/ etc. should they be listed in SE's as well.


imo...

 

[Domain Divestments]

For resales the answer is never. For SEO, as needed.

 

[Kate]

Broadly speaking hyphenated domains don't pass the radio test (the hyphen must be spelled out) and are not great for branding.
There is a language/cultural dimension to it though: half of registered .de have hyphens. But I avoid hyphens unless the combo is very strong.
They make sense with double letters, for example light-travel.com instead of lighttravel.com.com
Personally I would use capitalization too: LightTravel.com. Domain names are not case-sensitive, but the rest of the URL can be.

But there is some consensus that you would be at a disadvantage with your competitor if they have the non-hyphenated version.

Answer: for a serious project get both + plural/single + other extensions as appropriate.

 

[dompro]

But there are cases, where hyphens are used in natural written English. A very good example is de-addiction (deaddiction is wrong). In such cases, should the hyphen not increase the domain's value?

Please also tell me if there are other cases where adding a hyphen increases the domain value.

Which domain you think is better looking:
type-intraffic.com
type-in-traffic.com OR
typeintraffic.com?

The only time when the hypen may be needed in the domain name when without hyphens it can be mistakenly divided into wrong words.
For example: pros-extreme.com might be a better choice than prosextreme.com that can be spelled as ProSexTreme unless explicitly separated by dashes.

In all other cases dashes are bad. Just like we never type NamePros.com or Texas.com (with capitalization) into the address bar, we never want to separate each word in the domain name by dashes.

 

[biggie]

:talk:


glad you guys don't like hyphens


leaves more for me

 

[tabrez]

Thanks for all the replies. All the facts you guys mentioned are necessarily true. But let me tell that some words like de-addiction, de-allocation, etc. are typed in English with a hyphen in most cases. Should these domains not have an advantage because of its more search-engine-frindliness and more type-in traffic?

 

[silveraden]

It's not all about the domain. It's about marketing and promotional strategy... There are other ugly domains that making thousands of dollars per month. Ex: language-school-teachers.com

 

[Domainate.com]

In terms of name quality, never. A domain with hyphens will never be worth as much or more than the same domain without hyphens.

That said, for SEO it's said that hyphens don't make a difference. Some people think it actually improves the SEO benefits of the domain by helping to split the words properly, but I think that hasn't been true for many years given Google's advancements.

So with regards to getting domains for SEO, many SEOs will choose hyphens because they can get better terms for the same price.

But yea, possibly the closest you could get to preferring a hyphen in a domain would be t-shirt.com vs. tshirt.com and I can tell you that these days, despite t-shirt being more proper, that domain would lose a lot more traffic to tshirt.com than the other way around.