Hyphens – Domain Name Poison?

July 6, 2009 by Butterfly Filed under: Domain

In the Middle Ages people debated the question, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Very little has changed. Here in the Twenty-first Century we consider such imponderables as “Does Google penalize websites with more than one hyphen in their domain names?” Now, as then, the answer is unknowable for the engineers at Google are as impenetrable as the mind of God. About all we really know about hyphens is that you can use them, but not at the beginning or end of the domain name.

Some citizens of the web claim that the search engines will penalize any hyphenated domain names. Some say that animus only applies to names with two or more hyphens. It isn’t clear from the literature what it is about multiple hyphens that annoy these engines, but some think it’s the appearance of multiple keywords and the presumed intent of the owner to game the system.

Others swear by hyphens. They say multiple hyphens make it easier for people to read and remember your domain when your name is quite long. Take, for example, a name like howtoreadapoem.info. Isn’t it a lot easier for the human eye to scan how-to-read-a-poem.info? They have a point: in an Internet culture that opens and discards sites in two seconds or less, how many people are going to labor over the pronunciation of your domain name? They also claim the spider bots prefer hyphens because it makes it easier to parse the keywords (I find it difficult to believe anything slows them down).

I feel strongly about both sides of the issue. On the one hand I have created hyphenated domain names with the intent of getting extra mileage out of the separated keywords-an obvious attempt to sucker the bots. On the other hand, in the increasingly crowded world of extension .Com, hyphens are the only way late-comers to the domain name game can get the words and phrases they need for their businesses, organizations or whatever. Surely God-Oops, I mean You-Know-Who-would be aware and understanding of that. There, aren’t you glad we’ve finally put this heavy question to rest?