There was a time when hyphenated top-level URLs ruled. It enabled publishers to easily plug-in keywords into their top-level domain, which carried a lot of weight with the engines. Well, as you can imagine, that technique was overdone and lost its effectiveness. Do a search for just about anything competitive on Google and you will see few, if any, hyphenated URLs such as www.your-domain-name.com. (This, however, www.yourdomain.com/this-is-ok, is OK.)

That's why I'm always surprised to see new startups go live with a hyphenated domain. One could argue that enough backlinking juice would cure any URL issues, but why start out in the hole. There's a good change that you're starting out with a penalty out of the gate, just for your domain choice. Not good.

In addition to hyphenated URLs being a bad choice, unless you have an exact-match domain name, it looks like you could pretty much pick anything and start from the same line. Who knows? Maybe having something totally unrelated to your market is a great choice. Craigslist, Monster and Indeed all have nothing to do with job search, yet each is a top brand.

I know a lot of people who are ga-ga over URLs. In some instances, I see the attraction, but in most, I don't. Most should agree, however, that no matter what your domain of choice is, it shouldn't have a hyphen. SEO is too challenging as it is.

Labels: SEO