keyword vs. key-word

[coder]

I just stumbled upon this little known secret.

It appears that SE's recognize keyword.com the same as key-word.com and that also hold true for ke-yword.com.

The little testing I did on this is doesn't appear it matters where the "-" is in the url. so if you only care about SE's and not users, you can purchase virtually any word or phrase you want and place a hyphen in the word.

At the time of writing this c-omputers.com is available

but w-ebsite.com and s-ex.com is taken, apparently someone already knew about this.

[grobar]

The little testing I did on this...

Please elaborate on the testing you did. Not sure exactly how you would go about testing this one.

[PajamaExecutive]

Second That..!

I've known this for a long time and have a few websites with hyphens in the domain names, but I'm really interested to hear your testing details.


Respectfully,
Chuck Mullaney
Founder
PajamaExecutive

[DrTandem1]

That is really irrelevant. The domain name is for humans, not SEs. Yes, they can recognize words, so what? The domain name is for humans to be able to remember and enter.

Very little weight is placed on the domain name itself by the major search engines.

[RegDCP]

Very little weight is placed on the domain name itself by the major search engines.

How do you know this?

Reg

[PajamaExecutive]

Doc,

There are more than a few creative ways to get "clicked" that don't depend on the user's impression of the domain name and that would certainly benefit from better Google rankings.

coder,

Please continue...

Respectfully,
Chuck Mullaney
PajamaExecutive

[DrTandem1]

Very little weight is placed on the domain name itself by the major search engines.

How do you know this?

Reg

If that weren't true, then only sites with relevant keywords in their domain would appear high in the results. There are plenty of sites that are #1 that do not have relevant keywords in their domain name. Conversely, there are many sites with relevant keywords that are not high in the SERPs.

If all else is equal, then the domain name may become the tie breaker.

Look, the only reason we use domain names is because using only IP addresses would be very difficult for the human visitor entering a site directly.

By the way, adding hyphens only adds confusion to the human trying to remember a domain name. If you don't believe me, check the market rates for domain names that are hyphenated compared to unhyphenated.

[DrTandem1]

Doc,

There are more than a few creative ways to get "clicked" that don't depend on the user's impression of the domain name and that would certainly benefit from better Google rankings.

Huh? Can you please rephrase this so it makes sense? The topic was based on SEs recognizing hyphenated domain names. That is old news. What is more incredible is that they understand unhyphenated names, No matter, it makes little difference in the SERPs.

Yes, there are many ways to get traffic to a site, however, that was not the topic.

[Orion]

that's been known since I took my webmaster courses at college back 10 years ago now.

the other side of the coin holds true too.. the bots know enough to take keywords and separate it to key and words. you don't need to put in a hyphen.

remember the key to not getting penalized.. design and build your site for your site visitors NOT for the search engines. k-eyword.com will get you nailed in any human edited directory and eventually I figure the SE's will do the same... like now if you have more than 3 words with 2 hyphens they frown a bit.

make it easy for visitors to read and remember the URL.

[craigmn3]

I have known for a while (years) the search engines have counted dashes and understrokes as voids. They don't figure them at all. I used to optimize with dashes and under strokes until I realized that I was trying to capture smoke in a bottle. Worse yet above ground pools reads the same as abovegroundpools as the same as above-ground-pools.
So have fun

I appreciate what was said about web pages are for people and not search engines. Think of search engines as the program guide on the TV if your not listed you got nobody to watch the programs