What would be better: A 15 character hypenated (two) domain name or a single 13 character domain name?

Question

Details: Everything else being the same which do you think would rank higher from SEO POV..and why.

15 character domain name is this format: XXXX-XX-XXXXXXX.com

...where XXXX and XXXXXXX are keywords relating to my site, or a

13 character domain name is this format: XXXXXXXXXXXXX.com



Thanks

Answer 1

Note the following quote from SEMBasics.com (www.sembasics.com):

Also, don’t worry about hyphenating your keyword. It is true that a few years back hyphenated keywords within some domain names enjoyed a small ranking advantage, but today the major engines are getting better at picking keywords out of a phrase without the help of dashes (at least in the English language). As such, that advantage doesn’t really exist any more. Of course, you may want to secure both URLs to keep the other one out of the hands of your competitor, just make sure to develop the URL without the hyphen as your primary site.

This quote is from their article: http://www.sembasics.com/sem-blog/seo-friendly-urls, an article worth reading if you want to know how to properly optimize your URLs for the search engines. You may want to check out their intro to URLs article first: http://www.sembasics.com/sem-blog/introduction-to-urls

Answer 2

I was lead to believe that having a hypenated domain name would be better because search engines would not be able to see the keywords without the hypens. However, that is no longer true - type in a term like "belize real estate" (google or yahoo) and you will notice that the first domain to appear "www.belizerealestate.com" has "belizerealestate" in bold. That is because the search engines can now distinguish the keywords in a domain even if there are no hypens. This is all to say go for the 13 character domain name - it will be easier for people to remember.

Answer 3

If branding is not a consideration then the hyphenated domain is better. Firstly because SEs do not index on keywords in concatenated urls http://www.seo-blog.com/keywords-in-urls.php

Secondly, when your site gets unsolicited links they may be in two basic forms one where there is some keyword anchor text and one where the linker just anchors the url. In the second case because you have used a hypenated domain the anchor text will still contain your keywords. If you had chosen a concatenated url the search engines would not see the keywords but would see only one made-up word.

Answer 4

I agree with the SEO based answers provided here, using the hyphens will help the engines in various ways but I also wanted to point out that domains using multiple hyphens have the reputation of being "spammy" and created as throw-away domains. Try to get it down to one hyphen if you can so your site is taken seriously and glanced over by anyone reading the domain.

Answer 5

Statistics say that people remember the domainname.ext format much easier. However, Im not sure about the different ways the search engines mine for data, so I'm not sure the stats apply here.

good luck