Using Dashes?

When picking out a premium domain name most people choose to exclude dashes and numbers.

We wanted to weigh in a on the topic and maybe get some feedback from our readers on what they think.

Webmasters often skip over domains with dashes because when people are typing the domain in they will almost always forget the dash. This means you are handing a large percentage of your return traffic over to some other domain owner.

We really don’t think the dash is that bad. It’s not our first choice, but it serves its purpose. In a perfect world you would buy the dashed domain blue-widget.com and the non dashed domain bluewidget.com together. Things usually don’t work this way however.

From experience we say a single dashed domain is great if you are targeting a keyword or phrase. A triple dash is not good however. As far as we’ve noticed it’s really hard to rank well with a 2 dashed domain. (my-blue-widget.com) Im guessing it has something to do with a dash denalty that google has in place. No matter the reason it just seems to not work.

So in summary one dash is ok if you are targeting a word or phrase and cannot get the domain name without the dash. Don’t get a double dash, it ranks poorly in search engines.
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