Hyphen Domains – You better believe
By Alan on Apr 11, 2009 in Hyphen Domains
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.
Free Credit Scores | Apr 12, 2009 | Reply
I have NYC-Property.com and we rank high on Yahoo for many newyork property search terms always on the first page and often top 5 spots.
We just need to grow unique content and cut back on Adsense and then we should see the same with Google hopefully
Minisites are great and the revenue outstrips parking from my own experiance.
Alan | Apr 12, 2009 | Reply
NYC-Property.com is a great domain!
Read the next article also about mortgagecalculator.net
Another example – search for nyc condos
#1 ny-condos.com
#4 condo-sales.com
great name – build it out!
Free Credit Scores | Apr 12, 2009 | Reply
Thanks Alan
Dave Bhatia | Apr 12, 2009 | Reply
Computer-Technology.com , one great domain with hyphen is currently on auction at sedo.com . I own it. It will be interesting to see how this sale goes.
wannadevelop.com | Apr 12, 2009 | Reply
Hyphenated domains will rank just fine if you got tons of content and links pointing to them.
The exact match domain factor helps, but there are many other variable that come into play of course.
Top selection of domains in order for webmasters:
keywordkeyword.com
keywordkeyword.net
keywordkeyword.org
keyword-keyword.com
keyword-keyword.net
keyword-keyword.org
Yahoo indeed ranks domains with hyphens better than Google… But Google doesn’t discriminate obviously.
If the domain has been around for many years and has all the right stuff — it’s just as good
Stephen Douglas | Apr 13, 2009 | Reply
Yo! You say “Type in hotel rates in Google and # 1 search result is hotel-rates.com (175,000 visitors a month)”
Are you on some sort of web page that tells you how many VISITORS a domain gets a month, and if so, what is that site? I think a lot of domainers would love to know how many “visitors” are appearing a particular site each month.
Or are you really saying that the domain “hotel-rates.com” gets 175k “results” on google?
If it’s the former, I’m really really interested in where you went to find out the number of visitors to this website, or any website, for that matter. If you can know the number of visitors at this website, I’m sure you can know the monthly visitors to ANY website/domain. That’s something I could use. I’m just a noobie here… amaze me!
thx
Alan | Apr 13, 2009 | Reply
Stephen
Yo! Visit compete.com
You can type in any web address to view a one year traffic chart for ANY domain. If you’re using firefox then download the compete toolbar and every time you visit a site look at the bottom of your browser for People Count.
In my experience compete is usually lower than actual traffic so its a great measure of traffic.
Newbies love this tool – I was an addict for about a week. Be prepared not to work for a while – enjoy!
And yes .. Hotel-Rates.com has 175,000 people a month … hotels-and-discounts.com, 600,000
wannadevelop.com | Apr 13, 2009 | Reply
Compete.com and Quantcast.com are both way off, the best thing that comes close to telling you accurate stuff at about 50 – 150% +/- off the actual numbers is Google.
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=dnjournal.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Stephen Douglas | Apr 15, 2009 | Reply
Hi Alan,
I visited compete.com, and i found it interested by bloated and confusing in trying to establish a simple search on a domain’s stats. I guess you have to buy at least one of their services, which seem fairly high without actually proving the accuracy of their stats.
I guess if I was someone who cared about stats on a domain before I bought it, I would be doubting my own ability to understand future potential consumer trends based on science and technology. With my ow research, I like to buy OOTB domains, less gamble, better results when the gamble pays off.
it’s interesting though. I tested one of my most powerful domains, educationlottery.com, and I got a close proximity of visitors, not entirely accurate, but hitting the highpoints well. The lowpoints are off, because this domains gets constant visitors daily. It is the exact term for the southeast lottery term “educationlottery.com”. It gets about 2000 visitors or more monthly, and generates about $50 a month on an unoptimized site. I believe this site should be built out on Whypark.com…
wannadevelop.com | Apr 15, 2009 | Reply
^—- You believe it should be built out on WhyPark to make the most of it but it’s with Parked.com — very interesting. LOL
Double Hyphens Domaineering | May 2, 2009 | Reply
Double hyphen domains can work fine for domaineering if a .com, although generally not as well as without the hyphens. Depends on how heavily searched is the keywords / keyterm making up the domain.