Domains with Dash “-” vs Domains without

January 5, 2010

invest domains dash Domains with Dash “ ” vs Domains without Dashed domains have always been an interesting topic. One of the rules of domainers is that never to get domains with dashes, but when you go and research more on the principles of SEO, you’ll find that they recommend domains with dash. So who’s right and who’s wrong? Should we invest in domains with dash?…

… Although domaining and SEO do go hand in hand, in principles there are still certain factors where both are in conflict. Having dashed domains have been a very debated topic and up until now there’s no clear answer to which one should we go for. Both Domainers and SEO experts seem to give their own point of view and can’t really seem to agree to one.

dash domains good investment Domains with Dash “ ” vs Domains without – To invest or not to invest in dashed domains? –

On my personal research, I’ve found that although dashed domains is looked down upon in the domaining industry, we cannot ignore the fact that it still sells highly in domain sales. Also, SEO experts would say that search engines cannot recognize the spaces without the ‘ – ‘ which normally people type in the words like “keyword keyword keyword” (In this case, keyword-keyword-keyword.com rather than keywordkeywordkeyword.com). If you also look at search engine results, you’ll find lots of dashed keywords appearing on the first page results (and most often see them in the top 3 results!).

So why do domainers hate the dash? One simple answer I found was that domainers love “type-in” traffic. And you won’t find people typing in keyword-keyword-keyword.com in their address bar, you’ll find that they’re more likely to type in keywordkeywordkeyword.com right? Also, generally a dashed domain sells lower than the same keyword domain without the dash. Domainers are all about selling domains to others for profit and, of course, I’ll chose the higher valued one.

So should you invest on domains with dash or not? Depends, I would only invest in it if I find that there are:

High searches
Low competitors
Plans to develop

High searches and low competitors are pretty obvious factors on whether to invest in a domain or not, but Plans to develop is something else. What I meant by that is that you’re going to develop the domain into, at least, a minisite or a website. Parking it won’t really yield much revenues, as no one will type it into their address bar. Reselling it won’t always be attractive especially if the owner owns the non-dashed domain, and might just result to UDRP, resulting to you handing over the domain for free. So if you have plans to develop then it should be a good investment that could get you the traffic which you could monetize, but if its not these then I wouldn’t recommend to do so.

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