Hyphen Domains – You better believe

Alan — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 02:48:23 +0000

Mini-sites, SEO, keyword research and development is all the rage in the domain industry today but not often enough do we hear about hyphen domains for development value. I’ve blogged about the success of celebrity-gossip.net before but there are hundreds (if not thousands) of examples of hyphen domains which far surpass .net and .org names (without the hyphen) in terms of SEO success.

My theory (and this is NOT the general opinion) is that search engines are told to basically ignore special characters such as the dot in dot com and in my experience, and many examples you see when searching, this unconfirmed theory of mine often proves itself time after time by simply viewing successful indexing of websites with hyphens across search engines.

Now, of course, content is going to make you great but SEO placement is what gets many people started.

SEO is a kickstart to success.

See the traffic come and you are motivated to build a bigger and better site.

I’m not going to show numerous examples but these are important

Type in hotel rates in Google and # 1 search result is hotel-rates.com (175,000 visitors a month)

Search for mortgage calculator and # 3 is mortgage-calc.com (280,000 people per month)

Need a DUI attorney, click on dui-help.com at # 5 with 13,000 a month

Compare hotel prices in Google search results and # 6 is … wait for it … double hyphen …. www.hotels-and-discounts.com (600,000 people a month)

The point is content is king but do not discount hyphen domains in development. Ironically, we had one hyphen domain which we sold last year that earned $500-$1000 a month in revenue only to see the new owner park it and of course, the revenue went away. Well, we just bought the domain back to do it again.

Everyone has a different theory on this but the proof is in the results and we have owned some big ones over the years such as real-estate.com to confirm that its not just a theory.

Will you get 600,000 visitors a month with a double hyphen name?

No, but if you get 60 than you can start building and its very possible you may get that first 60 far faster than with a hyphen.com than a .net or .org.

Hyphens work (for development) – so start believing.

Hyphen Domains .. Sweet Surprise

Alan — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 14:02:49 +0000

We have a long hit list of domains constantly watched for price deals, development signs, ownership change etc. One we had on our list was celebritygossip.net (no idea what happened and why we did not purchase the name since the price was extremely fair – win some, lose some) however today we realized this name was a little goldmine.

According to compete – celebrity-gossip.net (yes, the hyphen version in .net) receives over 250,000 visitors a month. Further research shows it’s on the first page of results in Google for the term “gossip”.

So, the owners of a hyphen domain name (a .net) have done a great development job to realize a bucket load of organic traffic yet they made a big mistake and never purchased the non-hyphenated version. Celebritygossip.net is a true generic name so the new owner will benefit from a lot of traffic driven by one company’s misfortune.

What does this tell you?

With the right development even hyphen names can get you a lot of traffic (not just .com)
If you own a hyphen name do a quick search today (not tomorrow) and see if the non-hyphen version is available.

As for those who acquire domains, don’t forget to check and see if the hyphen version is currently in use. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Newfound Names LLC » Hyphen Domains

Hyphen Domains – You better believe

Hyphen Domains .. Sweet Surprise