

How one tiny hyphen destroyed our SEO efforts (2011) - silktide
http://blog.silktide.com/2011/06/how-one-tiny-hyphen-destroyed-our-seo-efforts/

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niggler
I suspect (not tested in this study) that the hyphenated version is seen as a
possible fake _if the unhyphenated version also exists_. That is to say, face-
book could be seen as fake because facebook exists, but a novel hyphenated
phrase like vexing-sesquipedalian would not suffer the penalty because
vexingsesquipedalian hasn't been used.

It would be tricky to test this, because you need to use a domain with hyphens
where the original doesn't exist (and then you introduce new variables into
the mix)

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eli
I would think that in practice the overwhleming majority of hyphenated .com
would also have an unhyphenated version (even if just a squatter)

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austenallred
I don't know, there are so many factors that go into SEO that assuming, "Oh,
it's the hyphen in the domain name" seems a little anecdotal to me.

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sp332
I think they did a pretty good job of controlling for all variables other than
the hyphen. What else could it be?

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kodablah
They swapped the content. Maybe the algorithm favors the site with content
earliest?

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noonat
It could be that the ranking prior to the swap is continuing to have some
lasting effect on the sites _after_ the swap. It would be worth doing the same
test on new domains (with new content), to be sure there weren't any side
effects from the swap itself.

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powertower
There is a very real possibility that hyphenated domains have a negative
impact on scoring with Google because historically hyphenated domains have
been spammy (vs. un-hyphenated domains) - and Google has picked up on this
_correlation_.

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jgmmo
This is from 2011, the frictionless owls case study is well known to those who
invest in domain names. Hyphens are a bad idea.

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jeremysmyth
Tell that to experts-exchange.com

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gwern
Exception that proves the rule.

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MichaelGG
I don't think evidence against a belief works like that.

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Wilduck
Proves: 3. To determine the quality of by testing; try out.[1]

The expression "The Exception that proves the rule" is just a wry way of
saying "Well, that's not a perfect rule."

[1] <http://www.thefreedictionary.com/prove>

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ScottBurson
I think there's a little more to it than that. If the exception in question
can be seen to have specific properties which are clearly the cause of its
exceptionality, and if those properties can be seen to be rare, I think the
exception supports the conclusion that the rule is a pretty good one, by
showing what an unusual combination of circumstances is required for it to be
violated.

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sesqu
That's pretty much what the saying is about. The existence of an exception
proves the existence of a rule. The reliability of the rule can be estimated
by considering the exceptionality of the exception.

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kaizen-konpusai
I like the alternate interpretation that understands "prove" to mean "to test"
in this situation, so that "the exception tests the rule".

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5h
My first thought was to the age of the domains ... all are the same though, I
wonder what order they were crawled in?

I'm sure there are plenty of sites that contain hyphens, that should be
favoured (and probably are with all the other signals) over their hyphenless
cousins, still seems unfair if there is a penalty though!

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tracker1
I'd be curious what the effect is of a non-.com tld vs. a hyphenated name...
ex: some-term.com vs term.io for example.

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bostonpete
When I google frictionless owls, I get the following top 3:

www.frictionlessowls.com

frictionless-owls.com

www.frictionlessowls.co.uk

So the takeaway I guess is that hyphens are bad but not as bad as having to
use .co.uk :-)

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ep103
I wonder if you'd get the same result running the search from as a british
google user (UK IP, gmail/google account obviously from britain)

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mcintyre1994
Positions two and three swapped for me. Searching from .co.uk from Firefox
private browsing. With this post gaining popularity though (it appears at
position 5 for me), I doubt we can learn anything more from these sites.

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dhawalhs
I have an hyphenated domain name and it has a very decent page rank. What I
have found is that for a particular keyword the sites with that keyword in the
domain name will rank higher than ones without the keyword.

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funtober
We recently had an internal debate about whether the anti-hyphen bias extends
to the rest of the url. We haven't tested it though. I'd be curious if anyone
has ...

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grecy
You mean like

<http://example.com/something-about-something> ?

Matt Cutts actually recommends using hyphens in this case:

<http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/>

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funtober
Thanks for the link! Very helpful. However, my own searching suggests Google
treats /something-about-something/ similar to /somethingaboutsomething/. So it
isn't a perfect example. If the same content is on both url's, would one
always win?

Our own debate was whether to hyphenate a two word phrase in the directory
structure: /kitchensink/whatever/ vs /kitchen-sink/whatever/. So we had to do
a similar debate as the domain hyphen analysis. Spam signal/Google treatment
vs. User Convenience vs. Does it really matter.

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ibudiallo
This makes me feel bad, I have a domain with a hyphen in it.

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camus
deal with it ! joking , content first ;) anyway SEO rules and algorithms
change eveytime , hard to say if it really matters or not.

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Nanopy
I wonder if it's to deter keyword stuffing in domains.

