Naming. Domains. Hyphens or not?
Josh says: “I’d get the hyphen and the non-hyphen, then you’ll sleep better.”
***FS***Perhaps a good point.. I view hyphen domain names as strictly psychological and difficult to type-in. Traffic numbers bear that out. If I had the non-hyphen “skateboarding.com”, I wouldn’t loose sleep about “not” having the hyphenated “skate-boarding.com”. But if I could get it cheap enough, and I were developing a big site, I suppose I would pick it up, even though I know it would make no difference to my biz.
They are clearly different animals, but I would put the importance of acquiring hyphenated versions of compound-word domain names in lower priority order than acquiring good typos of your non-hyphenated name. If you own the natural un-hyphenated version, you’re in the strongest position - hyphenated names just aren’t that powerful and don’t get much traffic.. I own lots of generic hyphenated domain names and they don’t blow my hair back. In fact, you have to own enough of these till you learn that people don’t intuitively navigate to them.
Honorable mention to a few big hyphens like “e-mail.com” which look good in print, convince everyone else that maybe they too need hyphens, but which are ultimately difficult to type, and not that critical in the end. If you want to be an SEO slave then hyphens work just as well in Search engines .. but any old “born-on date” domain name works just as well or better.
Hi,
Also, (using a domain example from Franks post above this).
If I own highheels.com and have a online site like the very nice online shoe site like heels.com on it, but don’t own high-heels.com…I not going to lose any sleep over it either.
Why, for all the reasons Frank mentions and maybe also the people that own high-heels.com or say highheels.net think its great and pour a lot of money and marketing into it building their own online store…the only thing that would do for me is help build my business and traffic for FREE…
There are a lot of examples around the Internet of people building huge sites with domain names that in turn are building huge traffic/business to other peoples domains for FREE…I say sleep well and take the free traffic with a smile.
Peace!
Dan
Hi Frank,
Great informative blog and congratulations on your successes. I started domaining a little before domainers started blogging and like most of you, faced criticism and skepticism wherever I turned. What seems obvious to me is so hard for others to grasp. Reading your blogs and the blogs of your friends encourages me on, as I do believe I get it! Regarding the hyphenated domains, do you think a big site under .net, who is caught behind a competitor who has the .com for a generic term, industry for that matter, be better off acquiring the hyphenated .com, if available, rather than promoting the .net site? Don’t you think you would lose much more traffic as a .net site, rather than trying to brand the hyphenated site? Your opinion would be appreciated. The best wishes to you and your family and to continued success.
Henry
Hi… On a recent vacation to Germany, I noticed something that surprised me – most URLs and domain names I saw contained hyphens. This was for .de as well as .com , et. al. TLDs, as well as words and phrases in both German and English.
Do Germans prefer to hyphenate their domain names?
mp/m
***FS*** Yes.. Absolutely.. I know what you mean and I should have mentioned that.. different cultures/languages may be more inclined to hyphenate than others