I have a domain that's about 5 years old with 3 hyphens. Since I'm seeing less and less domains with that many hyphens in the Google SERPs, I have a feeling that it's a black mark against my site. I'm competing in one of the classic sectors of the web for attracting spammy sites, but mine is fairly clean and full of written content.
The site took a major dive in the fall Google traffic wise, then came back, then dove again in late March.
I'm thinking that since I'm not visible in the SERPs right now, it could be a good time to either 301 or meta refresh my pages over to another domain.
My options are this:
- do nothing and wait for my pages to rank the way they used to
- drop my present word1-word2-word3-word4 domain for new domain using the same words (so site graphics remain the same) without the hyphens - risk of sandbox for the brand new domain
- move content to a related 1 hyphen domain of mine that's also about 5 years old and not really in use, has a few crappy links, but isn't sandboxed.
Depending on which domain choice I make, I have the option of 301, meta refreshing, or using robots noindex,follow and having navigation on oldpage.html linking to newdomain.com/oldpage.html
A number of threads suggest that a 301 is the kiss of death for traffic for awhile, but right now it's very low anyway.
I feel that, while sites seem to drop for no reason, the fact that I have a spammy looking domain name in a category fraught with spam can't be helping anything. I don't want to put anymore effort into the site if the domain name itself is holding it back in the current algo.
What would you do?
There's still some multi-word sites doing well in competitive areas so I don't see a blanket penalty.
