Thread: Hyphenated domain names

MyFlicker, I think there might be a good market for cartooning for web sites, especially when they are of real nice quality, such as those found on your site. Most people's cartoons, including mine, look pretty amateurish.

Is "Your Fired" spelled that way intentionally? With the proper American English (guttural as it may be), "Your" is a contraction of "You Are" and is spelled "You're". So "You're Fired" would be the proper spelling.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

MyFlicker, I think there might be a good market for cartooning for web sites, especially when they are of real nice quality, such as those found on your site. Most people's cartoons, including mine, look pretty amateurish.

Is "Your Fired" spelled that way intentionally? With the proper American English (guttural as it may be), "Your" is a contraction of "You Are" and is spelled "You're". So "You're Fired" would be the proper spelling.

LOL Good point TopDogger - I knew that - just made another of my many typo mistakes - I do that often!

No end of times I write the wrong their and there when I know better and the wrong to two and too when I know only too darned well what I should have written. I call it keyboard dyslexia, though I know I don''t have dyslexia as dyslexics it seems can't read whilst voicing the words in their heads and have to mouth them, where as I have many voices in my head (That's a joke btw!).

I have a habit of writing without spellcheck and making dumb mistakes like that TopDogger, something my Mrs keeps telling me I should fix by writing in Word rather than Dreamweaver.

I have a really old version of Dreamweaver Studio MX that for some reason not only misses things like that when I do check the text, it joins words together when corrections are made and makes a real hash of things.

I upgraded to Dreamweaver 2007 or 8 a couple of years back but hated it and went back to 2003 version but I really ought to get into the habit of typing text elsewhere outside Dreamweaver.

Must say though I find Google's spellcheck useful when using Chrome on my forum as usually that's pretty neat.

I shouldn't complain too much about such typos though as my Double T Ted's TM came from a typo in a story I was writing called Clevalier High (About a School for Vampires) where I spelt "elongated" as elongatted" accidentally whilst writing about an imaginary computer virus and from that simple typo my Double T Ted's and the cartoons we're born and have subsequently evolved from.

If you read the Harry Potter books J K Rowling makes that same mistake and at least one other error in the first chapter or two of the 1st Harry book to.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

@bogart, the devil IS in the details. We do know that Google does not officially categorize duplicate content as a penalty, but they do get caught by the duplicate content filter. However, duplicate content pages typically get a gray bar PR and drop out of the SERPs, so I still say, "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck..." The net effect is essentially the same whether they call it a penalty or not.

This is correct that the end result is a "penalty" even though Google does not officially categorize duplicate content as a penalty.

So some of the answers from Google may be misleading depending on how the question is asked.

Originally Posted by Natural Elements

I've got an e-commerce with hyphenated domain name. It doesn't matter, people remember my company name and look for it in search engines.

The keywords in the domain are fine. Many people are using the hypens in multiple word domain names. Even when there's some benefit for an exact match, it's not worth the effort for an established site to switch the domain.

Though hyphenated domain names can avoid the "slurl" issue, I still prefer domain names without hyphens... While some people say that it has some SEO benefits, I don't think this is important since search engines have become smarter these days and they are already adept at determining separate words without the use of hyphens... Also, people find it more easily to type domain names without hyphens... It may also pose recall problems internet users are more familiar with not hyphenated domains... It also harder to advertise a domain name either through radio or through word of mouth if it has hyphens...

I will use hyphenated domain name only if I could not find it without hyphen. It is difficult to memorize and people tend to miss the hyphen while typing and thus it may lead to customer lost.

I would say its better to avoid hyphenated domains. But if you already are using one for many years than stick with it and 301 redirect the non-hyphenated version if it's still available.

If you're putting content on a hyphenated domain, then keep in mind that you're potentially giving traffic to the non-hyphenated domain. People may forget to put the hyphen in when they go directly to the domain.

You shouldn't really stress about that unless you have a site with 5k+ visitors a day. Most people nowadays will rather type in the FULL url in Google than the address bar. Address bar is sooo 20th century

Originally Posted by tetrapak

You shouldn't really stress about that unless you have a site with 5k+ visitors a day. Most people nowadays will rather type in the FULL url in Google than the address bar. Address bar is sooo 20th century

Probably more of a reason to own the non-hyphenated domain.

Why? (this is character wasting here.)