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The Use of Hyphens in Domain Name – Yes or No?

For the sake of SEO and exact match domain when creating an Adsense niche site.. What are your opinions on exact match domain with “-” hyphens.. i.e. your-exact-match-domain.com — Obviously, if it was a site/business I wanted to brand, I would stay far away from hyphens.. But what about for the sake of a Niche Adsense site that attempts to get organic traffic from the search engine(s)? Or, even in this situation, do you prefer just adding a suffix or prefix to the domain. i.e. yourexactmatchdomainhq.com ?? Thanks in advance!

    Josh Dunlop
    Posted 5 months ago

    From my own personal experience, having hyphens in your URL doesn’t hold back your website when it comes to SEO. One of the biggest photography websites in the niche is digital-photography-school.com, and that doesn’t seem to have any trouble ranking in Google. Ideally, it would be better to not have them, purely for the sake of visitors typing the URL in themselves, who may forget, but I don’t think it would be that much of a problem.

    Hope this helps, Josh

      Michael
      Posted 5 months ago

      Interesting question. If you mean, Income-Diary.com – I’m against domains like that. For seo, I guess it does work, I’ve seen a lot of sites do it. But for branding, I find it a pain to remember how to spell the domain. One thing I noticed someone doing was using the keyword, and then keyword again. For example, Football-Football.com. That website ranked well for the key term. (FYI, that URL isn’t the one I found).

      I quite like HQ.com, years ago, I saw people use HQ a lot at the end of domains, I feel it works best for short domains, for example, runehq.com

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