The use of "-"

Cianos

What are your thoughts on having a dash in a domain name? There's a name that I would like to go for but the only way to do it is to have the dash in between the two words of the name.

On a side note, coincidentally the site that has the name without the dash is in business in the same industry..could this cause us problems?

Thanks

If the other site is established and is popular, you could have problems. But that's loser talk.

The hyphen '-' is perfectly acceptable. Google will interpet it as a space, which is not a bad thing at all.

Axwell

If the site that is without the dash is in the same business then it would best be avoided. People will inevitably end up going to their site by mistake because they are higher ranked in google and more established an they wont type the domain with the hyphen when searching in google. Once they see a site with the same product they are looking for they will assume its the right website. You would be much better off to find something unique.

Liam Byrne

It is also an absolute pain to advertise on radio or wherever.

Advertise "Visit www dot my website dot com" and they'll go to the competitor.
Advertise "Visit www dot my hyphen website dot com" and it sounds dire.

Pixelcraft

Yes absolutely, I always find it funny, most of the people that have to read out whatever-dash-whatever.ie never bothered to register the domain without the '-', it's almost always available.

Cianos

Thanks for the replies. I am considering going for the hyphened URL for a few reasons;

1. The site that has the unhyphened version is based in a different country than where we will be based. So I think people who will be googling the name and/or site will probably find our site first if we originate from the same country. Could be wrong on this though?

2. Our audience will not be native English speakers, even though the name will be in English. Thus I think the break between words will better communicate the name as someone who doesn't have English as their first language may not be able to quickly distinguish the two words.

3. I do recognise the barrier to communication that a hyphened name can introduce, such as when the name is being spoken, but we don't plan on doing any radio ads or such like.

Are these good enough reasons to stick with it or would you still advise choosing something else?

p

If you're going to ever have to tell people the name of the site and they will have to remember it to visit it, then don't go for the hyphen.

If radio advertising is ever going to be important for you it could kill you business.

Overall - i'd avoid it. It's easy enough to think of a better domain name that isn't quite so literal.

jmcc

Bad. Really bad. People do not think in hyphens. By all means register the hyphenated form of your domain but get the unhyphenated domain first.

Regards...jmcc

gracy

We have a hyphen in our domain and there is a poet and a car dealership with the same name and they do rank higher than us when someone types in the name.As time goes on we are moving up the rankings but i presume our new site will have a lot of work done on seo and keywords so we will move ahead of them in rankings.In other words the hyphen could slow u down but it is not insurmountable if u do the necessary work in oither areas

Cianos

Our main product is specialised bicycles. So the main 'presence' of the URL/Brand will be on the bikes themselves, as people see the bikes in the street and hopefully take note of the brand name and go home and look us up.

With that in mind, would this be a good idea or a bad idea;

Register the some-thing.com targeted towards the international market. Register the something.de and some-thing.de for the local market.

It's not a 'does what it says on the tin' name, so people searching for the products we sell won't be entering in the words in our URL in order to find us. Unless they have heard the name or have seen the name and then do a google search for the name itself (the way people google for "youtube.com" :eek: ). Otherwise I'm guessing most of our customers would come from searching for the products we are selling so if we have good SEO focused around the product itself, maybe the name becomes less relevant?

Thanks

cormee

Liam Byrne wrote: »

It is also an absolute pain to advertise on radio or wherever.

Advertise "Visit www dot my website dot com" and they'll go to the competitor.
Advertise "Visit www dot my hyphen website dot com" and it sounds dire.

This!

Also telling someone your domain is a pain (speaking from experience)

"so it's yourdashdomain.com?"

Avoid hyphens. Just listen to the Quinn Direct ads on the radio if you want to hear how bad it sounds.

gracy

The common consensus is correct and that is that leave the hyphen out if u can.The main reason for doing so is u priob will rank better without it.The thing about people not remembering the site name is not that important as people generally will google you and not type in www.xxx. ie the exact site.
We did a wedding show yesterday and had the compair call out the web address repeatedly and i bet very few people would remember it with or without the hyphen.Only really well known sites will be remembered verbatim .people are lazy about remembering site names as they no they can retrieve them on a google search

Pixelcraft

gracy wrote: »

The main reason for doing so is u priob will rank better without it.

Nothing at all to do with rank. We have to remember that websites are used by people, not google robots. It's a semantics issue.